Coworkers past, present, and future:

1) When I’m at the local barber shop getting a haircut, the one (tall) (young) (pimply) (Thai) cook barges in the door, since it’s evidently his first time there and he doesn’t know that you take a number written on a strip of Post-It note pasted on the door and wait outside until you’re called, if there’s someone in the shop getting their hair cut when you arrive.

And, he takes a number and goes to sit at a picnic table at the far edge of an adjacent parking lot, and he ends up getting his hair cut there next, after I’m done.

“Oh my god, soooo sexy, where did you get your haircut?”, I tell him all night later that night, when we work dinner shift together.

2) My one (tall) (skinny) (techie) (Thai) coworker tells me when he’s at the restaurant one night with a friend that he’s moving back to the area from a town like an hour away where his parents live, and that he might start picking up shifts again since he’s between jobs and doesn’t have anything else to do right now.

A sight this fall near my cottage:

Outside the window by the far end of my dining room table, a gigantic thin spider web is suspended between the eaves and the top branches of an evergreen bush, and it’s so dense that an entire stick is suspended in mid-air in the middle of it, and it twists in the wind.

Three happening this fall at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) On the back kitchen prep counter, there’s a hunk of knobby carrot-bottom set out, and someone had carved a nose and a mouth into it so that the knobs looked eyes and the whole thing looked like a pig-head.

Quien es el artista? (“Who is the artist?”), I was like, and it turned out to be my one (smiley) (Guatemalan) coworker, who gave me a smile and who seemed all happy as he said that it was him.

2) When it’s time to clean the bathrooms at the end of shift and I go to get a sterilizing wipe out of the bottom of the tub where it’s fallen, I wedge my hand in there, and when I pull it up, the edge of the plastic tab that sticks out to hold the wipe in place scrapes against my hand, and it quickly takes off a rather large strip of my flesh.

3) When I go to serve a table and I mix up the curry for one person with the curry for the other person, the one customer notices it and asks if it's his and it is so I swap them both and as I do that he's like, “No worries,” so I’m like, “Yep, thank you very much, no worries, with the curries!”, and they all get a kick out of that.

Justifed hesitation with cheap razors.

So, recently I needed some new razors, since my old ones couldn’t get me that fresh shave look when you did the last pass cutting across the beard-grain.

And, I was going to get my standard Bic ones at the local supermarket, when I noticed that they had a generic supermarket version of the same product, for a lot less money.

And, I hesitated, because part of me told myself that they just wouldn’t work as well.

And, you know what?

They didn’t.

Never again!

Conversations with two (Brazilians).

At the end of this summer, I went out for ice cream with the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM) post-doc who I know from around town, as well as a newly-arrived (nerdy) (worked-out) (STEM) (Brazilian) who’s there on an academic exchange and who he knows from his lab back home.

And, he got to telling him about a recent concert here in the States, where he was in the front row for this famous (Brazilian) drag queen pop singer Pablo Vittar, who kissed him.

“Wow,” the (nerdy) (worked-out) (STEM) (Brazilian) was like.

“And now for the rest of his life when he kisses someone, it will be like Pablo Vittar also kisses him,” I was like.

“Yes,” said the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM) post-doc, approvingly, in his cat-like voice that many (Brazilians) have.

“And,” I continued, “Whenever he eats ass, it will be like…”

“Hey!”, he was like, to the laughs of his (nerdy) acquaintance.

Later, too, he was talking about how he met up with someone from Grindr who was into puppy play because he wanted to see what it was like, and it turns out that he was just like a normal guy until they started fucking, at which point the guy squatted down all spindly-like on his legs and started thrusting and whining like a dog would.

Conference shit:

1) On my drive out to my conference this fall, I suddenly really need to go to the bathroom, so I park on the main street off of a courthouse square and duck in the first coffee shop that I see, only to find out that it’s a comic book shop and that the coffee shop sign outside was from the last tenant who is no longer there.

But, the woman at the counter lets me use the bathroom, and so I go duck in it and I take this just massive shit.

“Thank you so much for that,” I’m like, afterwards. “I’m starting out on a big trip, and I’m realizing now that it was a bad idea to make myself eat the last of my barley soup before I left, and then like drink strong coffee all morning long.”

2) At the conference itself, I acutely feel that I have no more fresh professional clothes, no matter how hard I tried to assemble something out of sweaters and long-sleeve shirts that I had tucked away in boxes. 

I just don’t fit in, even beyond the social hour talk of departmental politics and hiring and people's international vacations.

Revisiting old places.

I’ve noticed this past year that I’ve started to get joy from revisiting old places.

Like, on my recent conference trip, I was visiting a city that I had visited many years ago and seen parts of with two friends who had grown up there, and I very much wanted to revisit a decently famous large sculpture park installation that I had seen with one of them.

I really took my time driving in, so I arrived after dark, and I ended up just sitting there alone in light from the street-lamps that lined the streets of an otherwise busy intersection, and I thought of all the things that had happened to me since the last time that I had been there, like all the people I had known who had since passed away, and how unpredictably different my life was, and all of the ways that the world had changed.

I also kept trying to remember what exact year I had visited that park, and it kept eluding me, no matter how hard I tried to reason it out.

I also wondered if I would ever visit there again.