Visit conversations, overheard and otherwise…

…during a trip this summer to the city that I used to live in:

1) In the breakfast room of the hostel where they have very strict rules about when they’re open and how they close at this one time sharp for cleaning, this (Indian from India) family of 2 parents and a (20-something year-old) male child are there, and right after they make the announcement, the son turns to the parents and dismisses it and is like, “Oh, they won’t kick us out.”

2) When discussing tipping practices by foreigners, the husband of my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair) starts reminiscing about some movie where there’s a gag about some (Germans) laughing among themselves about how they can get away with not tipping, since waitstaff will see that they’re German and think that they just don’t know to tip.

“Oh, when they find out we’re Sudanese, usually they give money to us,” said my one (half Sudanese) (half British) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair).

He also was saying later that people are always happy when children are clever, but he’s not sure that it’s a good thing, since it tends to lead to many disappointments in life.

3) As I walk past a group of police standing around and talking by a curb on the way to the train station, one says, “I saw the autopsy photos, and he was a big fucking blob,” and I don’t hear what led into that or what came after, since I am just walking by.

. . . 

(Presumably, it was a suicide by jumping from some height?) 

The increasing normalization of speakerphone talking…

…as noticed on a trip to the city that I used to live in during late spring and early summer, when I encountered just multiple multiple people doing it in multiple places from train stations to busses to subways to random public spaces, including –

1) In the departure lounge of the train station, a (lower class) (black) woman practically yelling about how “he played me” and something about no respect and how she has a lot going on;

2) On a bus, this (gigantically fat) (nose-ringed) (light-skinned black) girl with thighs bigger than watermelons who took up two bus seats, holding out her phone and having this endless conversation with someone about rental apartments, her voice filling up the entire very crowded bus to where it was super distracting and even a tad difficult to have a conversation with someone next to you, since she’d start talking and it was like a louder-than-normal voice right next to you in your ear, butting in, even though she was sat relatively far away; and

3) This (late middle-aged) (Mexican from Mexico) guy on the subway, just pulling out his phone and having some long conversation in (Spanish).

. . .

That behavior was like EVERYWHERE.  It totally spread, very very fast, and it’s total noise pollution and very bad boundaries in public spaces, much worse than ever.

Once that happens and people get socialized into that, I really don't know how you pull back from that.

"A new low."

Overheard conversation about the value of a college education.

This fall, I was at the local brewery, and this (young) (blonde) (already intoxicated) undergrad came in for the first time, and he ended up chatting with the (white) (male) (Humanities Ph.D. dropout) bartender.

And, the guy was saying that he was in some aspect of music technology, and the degree is okay, but he could have really taught himself a lot of that on his own.

And, the bartender was like, “Yeah, that’s how a lot of people feel nowadays about college."

And, the kid agreed, but he also said that the program provided a community and connections that you otherwise couldn’t easily get.

A predicament of mine in late winter, earlier this year, and a helpful innovation:

1) Every time that I did my darn laundry, I’d forget to throw my winter jogging gear of stretch pants and thermal tops in there with it, since I keep it in a special part of my closet that I don’t look at too often when I’m gathering up stuff to go do my laundry.

2) Due to the minimal space in my closet in the small little cottage that I now live in, I often don’t have room enough for clothes like a normal person would have, and I had been sometimes throwing outfits on my couch or onto my bed, which didn’t look none too good, as they say.

Finally, though, I remembered this over-the-door metal hanger contraption that I got from Target years and years ago but never really used but never went and got rid of, either, and it turns out to be perfect for the back of my bathroom door, since it has like 10 different closely-embedded hooks that I can hang clothes off of, now, to keep them off of all of my stuff so that my apartment looks better.

Some signs of spring, this year:

1) My one (Guatemalan) coworker who we started the diablo joke about is back to do some fill-in shifts and make some extra money, and he shows me on his phone some photos of his son’s kindergarten graduation, with his son all excited and smiling this great big smile.

2) The patio season begins, and since the supply closet had been rearranged a little bit, the sun umbrellas are in a niche right next to where a big wide floor-mop is leaned up, so if you go to pick up the umbrellas, oftentimes, often you scoop up the handle of the floor-mop as well without at all realizing it, since that handle is leaned up right where the poles of the umbrellas are and you don’t notice that it’s not them, when you go in to scoop them up.

Customer levity, and discoveries.

1) This one (eccentric) (foreign-seeming) (gnome-like) (late middle-aged) (white) man who may have voted for (Trump) sits on the patio to dine, but then wants to leave when he finds out that our one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones isn’t working that night, since she’s the one who knows his very particular order.

So, as he leaves, I take his stuff back inside and explain what happened, but my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker is like, “I know his order, I know his order!” and she tells me to run outside and go get him, so I do, as he’s like a third of a block down the sidewalk from the restaurant.

And so, after re-seating him, I grab his water and cutlery and bring it back out to him, but when I come back inside again, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker is all hyped up and visibly quite nervous.

And, as it turns out, all that time she was trying to call our off-shift coworker who knows his order, but she wasn’t answering her phone, and so my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker begins to panic, and is all laughing and gleefully admits to me, “I don’t know his order!”

. . . 

(He eventually remembered some of it, and we were able to piece it together.)

. . . 

2) When I talk to these two regular (late middle-aged) (white) (evangelical) customers who always come in and who are always very nice and tip well, somehow I get on the topic of home-fermenting sauerkraut with the (curly-haired) (redheaded) wife, and when she indicates that she’s very interested in trying it to see what it tastes like and because it's "good for your gut," I say that it’s a shame that I didn’t know that before I came in to work that day, since I had just finished a very good batch and it’s worth trying, to which she says that she’ll actually be in that Friday night with people from work and I say that I’m not working then, but I can bring some in for her and leave it with my coworkers and she can ask them then and get it from them, then, and that’s what we can do if she wants to try some.

And, she does and I do that, and that happens.

And, when she asks them for my name so she can write me a thank-you note – you have to remember, you know all of these customers by face and they know us by face, but none of us know each other’s names, unless you maybe see that on a credit card – they tell her my first name, and she’s like, “Oh, like my husband.”

All that time, me and him shared the same first name, but none of us ever knew that!

My (Thai) coworkers talked about that quite a bit, afterwards.

“Oh, like my husband.”

Some object on their way to disposal:

1) For a while, the top of one pair of my work shoes seemed to be pulling up a bit around the edges, on the left shoe. Then one night when I'm leaving work a few months ago, for some reason the leather top pulls up out from under the rubber sole on the whole front half of the shoe, leaving me with this floppy duck-foot mess that I have to hobble home in, because I have no way to reattach it and I have no other shoes on me and I have to get home somehow.

2) A few months ago when I'm discarding three bottle caps that had been thrown into the jar that holds the bottle openers when I'm at work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work, I suddenly notice that two are from Sapporo bottles and have stars on them, and so when I walk into the kitchen to go throw them out into the trash can there, I start holding them up on the front of my shirt like they're my nipples, to make people laugh.

"What are you doing?!", my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker says.

"What do you think?", I'm like. "Who knows, maybe if I do this, customers will give me more money."

"Less!!!", she was like.

Later, too, I put them up into my eye sockets and laid them on top of my eyes and scrunched down my brow to hold them in place, and since I could see out around them a little bit around the edges, still, I'd hold them there like that and then I'd walk up to different coworkers like my one (newer) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker, who was quite delightfully amused when she saw me like that.

The things that boredom will do.