A way that I’m feeling trapped, when I think about it.

In the college town that I now live in, I have really been in a good space with healthcare access through the Affordable Care Act… 

A smaller town really has stability of networks and providers, in a way that I don’t think you can get anymore if you’re in a larger city, since you have fly-by-night insurers there with narrow networks who come in and leave the market incessantly, pegging the price of the plans too low and decreasing overall subsidies and leaving people who can only afford those plans with substandard access and care and a lot of set-up work every time their provider leaves or they have to switch insurers etc etc etc.

All that has been off my mind for a while now – thankfully! – but, if I think about it, it also probably means that I can’t easily move to a big city again in the U.S., unless I have a job with healthcare attached or an income level that lets me be a bit more selective and choose from the more expensive ACA plans put out by reputable nationwide insurers.

Yet another way I’m trapped where I presently live.

Discussing the Aurora Borealis…

…led to an app recommendation for solar-flare tracking and this text from the one (lesbian) sister of my one (former) (assisted living client) with (disabilities):

I have been using an app for about 5 years now that alerts me when things are going on with the Sun. One day, I am 100% sure we will get hit with a big CME blast and it’s going to fuck much of the world up. I want to at least be able to look out at the Pretty Lights

. . .

(. . .)

An observation of the one one (nerdy) (worked-out) (STEM) (Brazilian)…

…when I expressed surprise that he had a smoking-marijuana-and-study day with the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM) post doc who I know from around town:

He laughs and is like, “It’s like you swim in a world of numbers.”

Some happenings from a while ago…

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

1) When it’s busy and my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker is overworked and talks to me sternly about something I’m doing, I’m like, “It’s okay if you’re angry with me, I understand, it’s what you need in the moment, and I am okay with that,” and when I say all of that all softly in a tone like I’m a hurt but devoted lover, she just gives me this glare.

2) “Caffeine bomb” is my new word for when people order a Thai iced coffee, like, I deliver one to a table, and I’m like, “Now, there’s a caffeine bomb right there, for you.”

3) A (shorter) (dumpy) (white) woman with (dishwater blonde) hair and a smell of liquor on her breath comes in the front door with a cardboard box full of smaller boxes of caramels and says they’re to support chemo for her daughter, could we buy some.

Refrigerator oddity…

…with an opened package of cured sausages with a resealable top that I had brought into work and then brought the rest of home and tucked into the refrigerator, eating some every now and then:

Thin white elongated crystals like miniature porcupine quills begin extending outward from the sausage-casing, and when you try to wipe them away like frost, it feels gritty, leaving the impression of nothing so much as preservatives that have somehow been extruded outwards from the meat by the cold and held in place by miniature crystalline structures.

Container reuse at work.

At work, a big old plastic Folgers coffee tub has been repurposed into a snack jar, with a piece of masking tape taped across it with the word SNACK written on it in big letters, to distinguish it from the actual tub of coffee that sits in an identical tub a bit over on that same shelf.

Inside the tub is small coffee candies and individually-wrapped gummies and whatnot, which gives the inside of the container a sugary smell, but since it also had strong dry coffee grounds sitting in it forever, the smells combine, and together they make something that smells vomit-like, and is nauseating when you first open up the tub-top and all of the fumes escape.

Oops!

After I return from my two week conference/vacation trip, I’m out in the yard by my back-alley cottage in the college town that I now live in, and I see a pair of my khaki workpants hanging off of the fence kind of behind a bush…

I had put them out there to dry a little bit more in the sun when I had done laundry a day or two before I had left, and somehow I had forgotten about them entirely, and had just left them there the entire time that I was gone.

Oops!