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

…in late summer: 

1) My one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker’s younger daughter comes in after school, and part of her hair is now dyed red.

“You have red hair?!”, I was like. “I didn’t know you dyed your hair!”

“Yes I do,” she was like. “Fix your memory!”

2) I have to step outside because I check my email, and this retired priest who’s a world expert on something that I’m researching received my email right away via an academic institution where he had taught a few years ago when I had emailed them the previous day, and within hours he had emailed me back with his phone number and said to call him at like 2pm the very next day, without checking with me at all about my availability.

Thankfully, although I only check my email only once a day if that, I had checked my email at like 1:50pm and I was able to take my waiter-pad and quickly sketch out the most important questions for him, and then take notes there in that as I sat out by the patio and called him and then spoke with him for like fifteen minutes.

Also thankfully, he had specified a time of day that happened to be very slow at the restaurant, where I didn’t cause any problems by dropping out of my workday like that.

Kind of loopy and very endearing, in an old religious. 

Feat upon feat of neurotic environmentalism.

Like half a year ago, the (Thai) (husband) owner of the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now gave us an instruction to replace toilet paper rolls in the bathroom when they're near to running out, not just when they've fully run out.

So, since then, whenever I have had bathroom clean-up duty at the end of dinner shift, I have pocketed any rolls like that, to use the rest of the toilet paper at home.

Since I also consolidate bags of trash from the restroom in order to save a bag and cut down on plastic waste, I recently found such a roll, cast in the bottom of the trash barrel.

I assume someone had changed the garbage bags the previous night, and *then* changed the toilet paper roll and thrown out the old one?

It was at the very bottom of the bag. 

Anyhow, it's no matter in any case, since I fished that out and pocketed it too, to use the rest of the toilet paper at home.

Just feat upon feat of environmental neuroticism. 

Unsolicited perspective from a(n older) (white) woman at the farmer’s market this summer…

…when she’s standing beside me as I get bargain specialty tomatoes and the helpful vendor points out that some of the ones I picked out are nicked, and I say something like yes, I had noticed that, and that I’d refrigerate those ones right away:

“You know that you’re not supposed to refrigerate your tomatoes, right? It destroys the flavor.”

A reinterpretation of the one break-in attempt at my cottage this summer…

...by my one (art school) colleague who wears (women’s) clothes, who texted me the following back in early fall:

I just continued to push for the truth

There was no homeless knocking that night

It was a street trick

Everyone saw the Ring camera video of you trying to sell your Business out on Main

Shaming it for the Unhoused

Shaking it!

. . .

(LOL.)

. . . 

A recent self-injury:

As I’m home in my cottage cooking at my stove in my wifebeater, hot liquid backsplashes and gets absorbed just above my navel, and though it has a quick searing hurt, it also quickly dissipates, and so I figure that the cloth has disarmed the heat and there’s no real risk to me.

However, later I see a Dalmatian-like spot of dark pink to the upper right of my belly-button, which lasts there for over a week.

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

…at the end of summer or the start of fall:

1) One (middle-aged) (white) guy who’s there with his family is drinking a ton of water, so when I go back to the table yet again to fill up his glass, I’m like, “Uh oh, uh oh, water emergency!”, and then I swoop in to refill it, to the amusement of his (elementary school-age) children.

Then, when we are chit-chatting and they ask me about my KN95 mask that I wear and I give them my spiel about reducing exposure with customers at work since we get so many people through the doors pretty much every single day, I also mention that I got the recent booster, and right after I say that, the guy uses a pause in the conversation to be like, “Thank you for doing that.”

2) A (middle-aged) (Latino-American) couple enjoy a nice big leisurely meal, and then they order a mango sticky rice to-go to bring to their mom at a local nursing home, asking us to please cut up the raw mango into super-small pieces for her so she can eat it.

Two customers from the end of this summer…

…at the one (Thai) restaurant I work now, in the college town that I now live in:

1) A (middle-aged) (slightly plump) (quiet but very affable) (middle-aged) (black) woman has this purse that’s full of rows of dots of bright primary colors, so I’m like, “Your purse is so cool, it’s like a Twister board!”, and I immediately start telling her that people could play a game on it with their hands, like “Left pinkie yellow!” and stuff, at which observation she laughs, modestly.

2) A (bleached-blonde) (Asian from Asia) guy is at a table of six people waited on by my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker, and she keeps telling me here and there throughout the duration of the people’s stay how odd his behavior is, and when they leave, I ask her more about it, and she says that the guy’s “narcissistic.”

And, she says it’s because he was like bragging the whole time, like he was saying how he grew up in (Singapore) and he also made sure to point out to everyone that he ordered appetizers for the whole table and would cover it, and he also made some comment in relation to the miso soup that he ordered that the restaurant was trying to do (Japanese) food, and then when the bill with the big table auto-grat came in, he was like, “Eighteen percent?! That is so high…”

And, she said that everything he did, it was all about him and look at him and what he’s doing and look at what he thinks, it’s so important, like, that was his behavior the entire time that he was there.

“Narcissistic,” she was like.