Recent conference revelation.

At the one conference that I went to this past fall, a presenter who was presenting some very good linguistics research mentioned some interesting things that he had found while reading a dictionary.

“Aha!”, I thought, “I’m not the only one!”

A self-directed put-down.

The other month, I was chit-chatting with the one (younger) (white) bartender with the (pussy-hat energy) at the local brewery, and she was telling me about her social science-subject matter college writing class, and while she was doing that, she put herself down and said that she never has any original research ideas.

And, I said that at her stage, much of your reading is just to gather basic information and orient yourself with facts and in fields, and so it’s hard to have an original idea like that, except maybe if there’s some new group and you “cut and paste” existing ideas onto it by analyzing this new data.

And, that pacified her a little bit, but not entirely.

Later, I also thought of how it’s a lot easier to have original paper ideas on a dense literary text where you just explicate that one text, and so the next time that I saw her, I told her that, and that her feelings might be more the result of the type of writing class she chose to take, than anything having to do with her ability, and that seemed to make more sense to her.

I also told her about a great strategy I had come across for making effective papers about a dense literary text -- you find a point in the text where something doesn't seem to make much sense to you, and if you can figure out what's happening and why, that's the paper right there, to present to someone the problem that you had stumbled upon and then solve it for them.

Soup-present.

Because I had cooked up a huge pot of “unstuffed pepper” soup and the one (gay) (Colombian) grad student who I know was preparing to defend his dissertation, I messaged him if he wanted to pick up some soup so he could have a few quick and easy dinners from that that coming week.

And, he did want some, so he did come by and pick some up.

Now, the soup is the same ingredients as a stuffed pepper – tomatoes, onions, green peppers, and ground beef – so the idea is that you cook up some white rice and pour the soup over all that and it tastes like a stuffed pepper, only it’s a heck of a lot quicker to cook than actual stuffed peppers since you don't have to go stuff all of them individually and bake then in shallow pans.

And, he texts me, and he says he loves it, but he decided to cut up pieces of ham and cheese and tortillas into it.

Like, that makes two types of meat in it – ground beef and ham – and why would he have tortillas anyways, I thought, since I thought that (Colombians) liked arepas.

I guess if it works for him?

But, it’s nothing that I would do, and I told him that he was desecrating my soup.

True crime-worthy line.

In my continuing routine about the break-up of my one (younger) (taller) (Latino-American) coworker at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I was asking him how it went where he took the new girl he’s interested in to a house-show where his cool ex-girlfriend might have showed up.

And, as it turns out, she wasn’t there, and everything went smoothly.

“That really would have made a good true crime reenactment, though,” I was like, and I then put on my announcer’s voice: “This alternative girl was fuming, since her ex-boyfriend showed up, with an alternative girl.”

And, he doesn’t watch too much true crime, though his mom does, he said, but he did have to agree with me.

. . .

(. . .)

Happiness.

I’ve been so productive the past few years, but it hasn’t necessarily increased my overall level of happiness.

As I’ve been telling people lately, though, I think I’ve finally figured out why – I haven’t been completing the right projects!

“After the next one, I’ll finally be happy,” I’m like. “It’s gonna be the next one that does it, I just know it.”

. . .

(. . .)

Have I been sucked into a new dietary trend?

This fall at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, a customer was deciding between entrees, and she vocally decided against one “because I need more protein”!

It seems to me that counting daily grams of protein must be a new dietary trend – I started taking daily protein powder, after all, since my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker took me aside as a friend and said that I wasn’t getting enough.

I mean, I’ve seen like bodybuilder-type people count protein for a while, including a visiting (Puerto Rican) (STEM) graduate student who came into the restaurant and asked me to load up his miso soup with tofu bits so he could get his daily grams in.

But, this is different, it’s like extending out into normal people who aren’t on strict daily regimens to radically increase their muscle mass.

I’ll say one thing, though – it’s a hell of a lot more tolerable than that pseudoscientific anti-gluten shit that’s been going around.

Those people are just weird and picky and inconsistent and annoying.

Happenings on a weekend double-shift…

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

1) A six-top of (college-age) (South Asian-American) (females) come in for a birthday, and they’re confused with what to do with the cake – the two who arrive first give it to us and tell us to bring it out at the end, and then they say it should be out already at the beginning when the birthday person arrives to surprise her, but when I ask them if they wanted it trayed up to eat first, they decide against that, and they then decide that they want it out at the end, again – and finally everyone arrives and they have a big meal and I go to take a picture for them when they’re in the middle of eating, and all of their plates are neatly aligned down the center edge-to-edge all the way down, like I’ve never seen happen with a table before when they eat family-style.

“Are you guys engineers?!”, I was like, pointing that out.

(They were.)

. . .

2) A customer requests her fork, because she unwrapped her napkin and found two spoons in it, rather than one fork and one spoon.

(Perhaps because I had word puzzles set out to look at, while me and other people were wrapping silverware?)

. . . 

3) A (master’s student-age) (South Asian from South Asia) couple come in on a date and after some time when I approach their table for any beverages besides water or anything else they might need right away, they look at me like dirt, and they say they need more time, and the girl is like “We just started looking at it,” and it’s partly a communication-functional thing where they don’t have the right words to respond and say they don’t need any help right then – like, “No thanks, we’re good for now” – but it’s also this attitude thing on their part, where they don’t like me being out of place and they don’t like me approaching them tableside on my own initiative.

So, I don’t wait on their table for the rest of the night, and my one (Chinese from China) coworker takes it over, and he says they’re pretty normal with him.

But, he does start reflecting at some point, that behavior like that could be a refraction of the caste system brought over here to (the United States), and I tell him that that’s what my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker and my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker were saying easily over half a year ago, about stuff happening like that.

(The couple leave like a $1.65 tip on a $53+ dollar bill, too, to round it up to $55… We should have made sure to keep an eye on them, to challenge them…  What a really shitty combination, caste system condescension and cheapness, two subpar manifestations of a broader lack of being “with it” with cultural norms that they should be aware of and adapting to.)

. . .

4) During my hour break between shifts, I’m getting cold brew coffee at the local brewery and doing some work online, and out of the corner of my eye I’d seen the one (older) (curly-haired) (white) customer-lady who comes in with her husband and is a bit like the Lovers skit from Saturday Night Live, and after a while she comes around to all of the tables with a plate full of cookies and cupcakes and dessert-bars and whatnot for people to get, since she was part of a table celebrating a birthday and she wanted to share leftovers with everyone.

And, she comes up to my table where I’m unmasked, and I’m like, “If it’s not Thai food, I don’t care,” and it takes her a few seconds to recognize me, and then she’s like, “Heyyyy!”, and I then pick out a few cupcakes and stuff for me to eat along with my coffee.

And, I comment that the roles are reversed now between us, that is, customer and server, and I say that she’s doing great, and after she goes over to some other people by the bar near me, I call her back and tell her that she is doing great, but she needs to lift out from the core when she holds out the plate of desserts for people to pick from, otherwise she’ll mess up her lower back.

(When I leave, I wanted to leave a dollar bill like a tip on my table and direct her to go get it, but she had already left by that point… She must have brought the desserts around to share as one of the last things she did before saying farewell and taking off from the birthday party.)

. . .

5) When I had slid in my laptop into my bag at work and accidentally let it drop in the last inch because I thought it was already setting in the bottom of the backpack and had let it go, I then began to worry about it a lot, especially whether it would even work at all the next time that I turned it on.

And, not only did it work, but my messed-up keys on the laptop keyboard began working again, so I no longer need to use an external keyboard that I had bought as a work-around to get more life out of my computer before I have to go get a new one again!

(“To make a thing work, sometimes you need to shake it,” my one [chubby] [Thai] coworker solemnly observed, when I told her about that unexpected turn-of-events.)

Break-up (2 of 2): Schtick, redux.

A week or two after that at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I was working with my one (taller) (younger) (Latino-American) coworker again, and I had set out a bunch of word puzzles for everyone to do in between things, but it was hard and I was the only one that was really getting them, slowly getting one by one the last 5 or 6 of a list of words all by myself.

“DERIDER!”, I was like, solving the very last one.

“Is that a word?”, my one (Chinese from China) coworker asked.

“Yes,” I was like, “It’s one who derides,” to his continuing disbelief that that was a plausible word to put into a puzzle.

Later, too, my one (taller) (younger) (Latino-American) coworker was shaking his head at “DERIDER” and saying he didn’t think it was a word, and I was like, “Of course it is, what’s on top of de horse?”, and he was like, “DE RIDER,” laughing.

Still, though, he was shaking his head at that puzzle, and when we were back in the kitchen by the packing area, he said something about that and how you really couldn’t expect anyone to get that, and so I put on an intense voice and was like, “Hey, you fucked it up with your girlfriend and you suck at puzzles, I know, but don’t take your shit out on me!”

Throughout the night, too, I had been making fun of him for becoming a “normie,” asking him if he was working out his upper arm muscles for [name of a famous very mainstream campus bar].

“She was such a good influence on you, now you spend all your time looks-maxxing,” I was like, and he just turned to me and was like, “You know ‘looks-max’?”, and he then further explained that it’s a young person’s word and that he had never heard anyone older using it, and when I asked him about usage, he said it was mostly ironic, like a friend of yours gets a haircut and you’re like, “Hey, so you decided to looks-max, eh?”.

He was also saying that he reconnected with this girl from high school who he had a crush on back then, and she goes to the same university now and they had met there again, and she’s like a (Chinese) major and is a lot less alternative than his old girlfriend, so you could say he’s becoming a normie that way.

“But I am taking her to a house show next week,” he was like.

“But what if you see your old girlfriend there?”, I was like.

“Yeah, we might,” he was like, “But if she saw us, she would probably just leave.”

“How do you know she wouldn’t take off her leather bracelets and throw them at you?”, I was like (he had gotten her some expensive studded leather bracelets a while ago, and she always wears them). “She could make a scene.”

“She could,” he was like, laughing.

And, I asked him if he knew the Investigation Discovery channel – he didn’t – and then I told him that this sounded like a plot from Mean Girl Murders, where they’d have actors playing them in reenactments and this house show confrontation was the moment that made the alternative ex-girlfriend snap, and led to murder.

And, he admitted that he didn’t watch much true crime, but, “Actually, it sounds like that,” he was like.

He was also trying to justify himself and say that he wasn’t becoming too much of a normie, he still goes to house shows, but I said that people don’t change all at once, that that was still the effects of the good influence of his old girlfriend, and it was just cool vestigial behavior on his part.

Break-up (1 of 2): Schtick.

So, my one (taller) (younger) (Latino-American) coworker at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now broke up with his cool long-term girlfriend as of July, I just found out this fall.

And, he says that they’re on good terms, but it was just a long time to be in a relationship, and they agreed to mutually end it.

“Man, you fucked that one up,” I was like. “She was a cool girlfriend.”

“What did you do?”, I added.

And, he laughed, but he also didn’t know what to say.

And, I told him that she was a good influence on him, and now that she was gone, he was going to become “all normie,” which made him chuckle.

“Can I tell her that if I see her?”, I was like, “That she was a good influence on you, and that now you’ve become all normie?”.

“Sure,” he was like, and so I said that I was going to tell her if I saw her that he had a changed a lot, now, and that he was going a lot to [name of a famous very mainstream campus bar], and plus he had changed his major to finance, too.

And, he laughed.

“And he’s started to listen to Nick Fuentes, too!”, I was like, telling him what I’d tell her.

And, he laughed again.

“She was a good influence on you,” I was like. “Just look at you now.”

Dust-up.

A while ago the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM) post-doc was saying that I should do my one linguistic discovery lecture/celebration event again since he wasn’t here for when I did it the first time, only I had to tell him that it was a one-time thing where I didn’t have anything else of that magnitude like that that would work again for such an event.

Only, after my conference this year, I realized that part of my new research direction that I was premiering was not only pretty big, but would also make a sexy short lecture that would be accessible to the public, and that I could put it together a similar if somewhat smaller event without too much effort if I had a projector, since I could reuse and adapt PowerPoint slides and I already had the poster template made up for the last event and I’d just have to adapt that, too.

And, besides that, I’d heard from the local brewery where I had my event that some random people who had attended had been asking bartenders if I was ever going to do something like that again, because they had come to my event and really, really enjoyed it.

So, I told the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM) post-doc that if he could check out a projector from the university so we could test-run the technology – I have access to the university libraries, but not to equipment like that – I would then set a date and put everything into motion.

And, he said that he would.

Then, like over a week later, he hasn’t done anything, and when we spontaneously meet for drinks when he happens to be out on a weeknight near where I live, he starts saying we should have a whole lecture series – good idea, but too late to plan it and I don’t want to coordinate that – and he also says that I don’t need to test the equipment, because the university tech center tests equipment before they lend it out, and I have to tell him that it’s about making sure that the equipment is appropriate for the space, and also that everything is compatible with the laptops and stuff we’re hooking in, since it’s a bad idea to schedule a huge event and just show up and put together technology you’ve never used before and that the whole event is dependent on.

And, he says he’ll do it on the Friday, but he forgets, and then Monday he doesn’t go into campus because he’s hung over, and by the end of that week he was already going out of town for Halloween, so I texted him to remind him again, and he starts debating with me by text again whether I need to test it out, so I tell him that we’re almost 2 weeks after he agreed and we’re repeating conversations and I’m this close to cancelling the event because I don’t feel like dealing with this, and he starts saying that I’m rigid and following a schedule that I have in my head and that I need to work with other people and trust them with technology and he knows technology, etc., and besides he was talking about a whole lecture series and not just me, and I told him that I was doing this for him, and he disagrees, and so finally I tell him this whole thing is just chaotic and stupid, and he refuses to get the technology, but then by Wednesday he texts me back if I still want the projector then or not, and I text him back no, the whole exchange left a bad taste in my mouth and I don’t feel like doing the event anymore.

I mean, give me a f*cking break, I ask someone to do one thing at the beginning of a process and they agree but then they don’t do it and I have to hound them and debate them multiple times over the course of several weeks and overall they’re just stretching things out so that all the major work gets dumped on me in a compressed timeline, I’m sorry, fuck that, I would do the event if I didn’t have to spend that much time or energy on it, and this is just sucking up time and energy into needless stupidity, and then it would put me in a needless crunch on the other end of things and maybe also hinder advertising so it’s a less successful event as well.

“How young is he?”, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker asked, when I told her about the drama (she’s met him).

And, “How young is he?”, my one (art school) colleague who wears (women’s) clothes also asked, when I told him about the drama (he’s also met him).

And, “Still young,” he replied, when I said around twenty-eight or so.

Community solar.

I recently switched my electrical supplier to community solar, and if everything is like it seems, I should have done this years ago.

Like, if I understand it correctly, solar is cheaper overall than regular electricity, but you have start-up costs and maybe you can’t get it at your house for whatever reason, so what private companies do is with the money that solar would save you, they start up solar farms and sell a part of the solar to you and from the money that’s saved you save money albeit a bit less than if you had it yourself, since the company also takes a slice of money from those savings because that’s how they make their profit.

It's like everyone wins all around, the environment and you and the company and it’s all legit, and it seems like state laws had to be put in place, too, to facilitate this framework.

Only, they advertise it and they don’t explain it clearly, and they send you letters saying that they’ll give you a $75 giftcard for whatever if you sign up with them, and it all seems scammy like they’ll get you to sign up and then whack you with high costs.

At least, that’s how it seems to me now…  We’ll see if this pans out when I get assigned to a solar farm and everything goes into effect.

Some Halloween levity this past Halloween…

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

1) My one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones asks me if I’m going to dress up as Katy Perry for Halloween.

“No,” I’m like.

“But I thought you have a row of Katy Perry costume at home,” she was like.

2) When I say something to my (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones that the only reason I’m dressing up is because she’s making everyone dress up this year, she doesn’t say anything at first, and then she says that actually I’m going to come to work and I’ll be the only one dressed up, because “it’s a trick.”

3) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker buys a Jason mask, and sometimes when she has to bring food out of the kitchen for customers, she slips it on, and she just shows up at their table with a hoodie and the Jason mask on, silenly bearing food.

4) My one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones dresses up like Wednesday Addams, which is cool because she has a Cousin It prop perched on her shoulder, which when we take a group picture and put our arms around each other, it looks like she has a hand on her shoulder, but it’s actually the Cousin It prop.

But, she’s a little old for the costume, so I whisper that to my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker, and am like, “She’s too old for Wednesday, maybe she could be Thursday or Friday,” and my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker whispers back, “Or Saturday.”

5) The (wife) (Thai) owner makes up a special Halloween dessert that’s a variation of a dessert we usually serve only now it has black rice, and when I try to sell it to tables, I’m like, “It’s frighteningly good.”

6) The day after Halloween, we work, and my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker says that she’s so tired, and I tell her that’s because after work the previous night she left with her Jason mask and went out and killed thirty-seven people.

“Why thirty-seven?”, she was like. “Why not more?”.

“Because the rest ran away,” I was like.

A weekend shift a few months ago…

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

1) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker brings in a bunch of prepackaged (Japanese) pastries called “Tokyo banana,” and I’m like, “That sounds like a Japanese sex toy,” at which when I say it she gives me ‘a look,’ though not unfondly.

2) When I get on dinner shift, there’s this huge sheen up on the wood floorboards towards the front of the restaurant, and my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker says that a (South Asian from South Asia) family sat there and their kid was in a high chair, and the kid spilled water and also ice cream all over the floor, and that’s what’s still left there after she tried to clean it all up right after they left.

And, it was like a $70 or $80 bill, and they tipped like $6.50.

3) Since it was slower, I got a wet rag and went to try mopping up more of the sticky stuff again – you could actually feel it on the soles of your shoes when you walked, and as you moved off it your soles left a few footprints of the sticky stuff beyond the patch of it that you had just crossed through – and as I was squatting down and wiping away, suddenly I heard this rip, and my workpants had split down the middle.

“So much work,” my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was like, about the residual mess from that family's child.

“Yes,” I was like, “We should have charged them automatic 18%, and an addition forty dollars for my ripped pants.”

4) When I tell my one (Guatemalan) coworker who we started the diablo joke about that I heard that they’re doing some inaugural native language classes for his native language at the local university, he said that he had already heard about it through his wife, who had heard about it at church.

Some customers the day of the local Pride parade…

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

1) Two (like almost high school age) (white) girls come in and we sit them at a table at the back, and then when we’re off doing other stuff one just goes up to the service station and helps herself to a small styrofoam takeout box, and that’s on their table forever and they have glitter makeup stuff spread all across the table and some water and makeup stuff at the bottom of that Styrofoam box, and they have their own chairs and the unused chairs pulled out wide so it interferes with seating at the adjacent table, and at one point they even put dirty dishes on one of the adjacent tables, and when I go to reckon up with them they say yes they’re ready for the check, and then when I go to the back counter and get it and bring it up, at that point they tell me that they want to separate the bill out into two checks, and ultimately they tip less than you’re supposed to, to boot.

(For all that chaos… People would never behave like that so blithely, at a [non-Asian] restaurant.)

. . . 

2) A (quiet) (awkward) (Asian) (male-to-female trans) person who probably studies (STEM) comes in to eat by themself, and at one point they’re just kind of aimlessly wandering up the center of the restaurant with no clear purpose – looking for the restrooms? needing assistance? – and so as I walk towards them, I don't think and I’m like, “Can I help you, Sir?”

(Oops.)

. . . 

3) Two (older) (white) lesbians come in and are sitting at a corner table and for one of them I keep refilling her water glass for ever and ever, and at one point when I refill it again, she comments, “I just don’t know why I’m drinking so much water today,” to which I’m like, “Ecstasy?”, and, “You probably shouldn’t be rolling in the middle of the afternoon.”

Later, too, they have some discount coupon to pay that I’ve misfiled before, and so I tell them to wait until my coworker is back and can ring them up at the front if they bring it up there, and as soon as I say that, the one is well-meaning but a bit presumptuous and is like, “I can help you on the screen,” and she explains that she can walk me through it.

(Actually, it’s a recording system we have, because in addition to having to scan the proper coupon, you have to mark down numbers and make sure it’s the active coupon rather than an old one that's pulled up in the same on-screen list, because the sh*tty website doesn’t make that clear, and sometimes you only see old coupons or you finally locate an active coupon and scan it but then it disappears and you can’t tell which number coupon you scanned, it’s all very confusing.)

Addendum.

On one of those last trips to the farmers market like in later October, I was walking towards the market and I was passing some outdoor seating at a small breakfast café place, when I started sneezing like I do and I just couldn’t stop sneezing and sneezing and sneezing like happens with me sometimes, where it’s one sneeze that starts and then the feeling lingers in your nose and then it grows into another one and it repeats like that over and over and over.

And, this one (tall) (late 40s) (lanky) (bearded) (black) man is sitting at a table there with a (black) woman (his girlfriend?), and as I pass by and sneeze and then sneeze again, he calls out to me affably, “Get ‘em all out!”.

Farmers market find…

…at the last few farmers markets of the year this year:

Big pear-yellow knobby things that were more shaped like large apples and that had a very robust sweet smell, that turned out to be quince.

. . .

The one (grey-haired) (pulled-back ponytail) woman at the stand said that she had planted the trees fifteen years ago, and this is the first year that she finally got fruit from them.

“Like quince jelly?”, I was like, and she was like, “Yeah.”

They’re much too hard and sour to eat raw, too, she said, so you have to boil them or bake them or put them in jams, like recently she tried baking them like baked apples and they were pretty good, she said.

. . .

(I got them over two successive weeks, and I tried baking them in different variations like in a honey syrup or in thin slices and then adding honey at the bottom of the bowl when I pulled them out to eat them. I'm not in love, but they weren't bad, they were more interesting than anything else...)

Intuition of character.

A while back when it came out that Luigi Mangione got in a fight with some Thai ladyboys, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker texted me right away, and then the next time that I was at work with him, I asked my one (taller) (younger) (Latino-American) coworker if he had heard that news.

“Oh yeah!”, he was like, “Actually I had!”.

Then, I was like, “Now you, you’re Luigi adjacent, but you’re too respectful, you wouldn’t go getting into fights with Thai ladyboys,” and as soon as I said that, he started laughing, and he was like, “You’re right.”

Then, I was like, “You’d be like, ‘Hey ladies, calm down, calm down, you’re lovely women, you’re really lovely, why can’t we be peaceful with each other?’”

And then, I added, “You’re much too respectful of people and other cultures, to get in a fight with Thai ladyboys.”

And, he agreed.

A dream of discomfort.

The other month I dreamnt –-

I’m in a large sterile corporate lobby with just a big grey desk on industrial carpet, and a (young) (black) woman is standing behind it and going with me through the contract returning my rental car, and it’s on two different sheets of paper splayed across a manila folder, and I carefully look through all of the boxes denoting the different very specific parts of the car, to make sure that they’re all marked as undamaged, and as I look through everything and double-check with her that there was indeed no damage marked on my car when I returned it, I notice that on the right there’s a column where she has checked different aspects of her own experience with me as a customer, and under the box marked “Customer Conversations” there’s a tick-mark indicating that her experience was “Oppressive,” and right away I know that all of my neurotic questions to make sure that I didn’t get charged for car damage were a very tedious and annoying experience for her.

And then, I wake up.

. . .

(. . .)

A retort that I recommended to my one (former) (assisted living client) with (disabilities)…

…because the place she’s applying to is having her undergo a psych eval:

“What?! I’m perfectly fine, apart from my coprophilia.”

Observation of a local bus driver...

...when I’m on the way back from a trip to the mall for new workpants and workshoes and we stop at the local transit center and the bus driver rouses a (late middle-aged) (black) man who is slumped over on the front seats and makes him get off the bus:

This has really been happening the past two years, he says, especially when it gets colder out and at the end of the lines, because you have people boarding the busses and staying on them to rest and sleep and get warm, it’s really been something that’s been happening the last two years, he thinks.

A lazy evening at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now.

The entire evening I do nothing but graze – some spicy pork and tomato dish over rice that a cook made up and I tried a small bowl of, and then a lot of gummies and also a big bowl of edamame that a table ordered as an appetizer and then practically never touched – and so I just feel stuffed and lazy and don’t even want to order any food to go for my shift-meal, and then when it’s time to cut down staff, my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones is folding silverware, and I’m being amicable because I don’t really need to be the one to leave, so I’m like, “I can stay,” at which my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones is just like bluntly, “No,” and then she smiles devilishly.

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

1) After a big college football game where the local university lost, a group of people with opposing t-shirts come in and sit together, and I’m like, “Hey, no gloating [opposing team name] here!”, and towards the end of the meal when they don’t want dessert, I turn to the opposing team guy and am like, “Hey, what, no dessert to celebrate?!?!”

Later, too, when I’m on my break and having a cold brew coffee at a local patio, a guy with an opposing t-shirt goes right by me to go to walk in, and I call after him, “Hey, no [opposing team name] here!”, at which he laughs, and then for some reason he’s back out of the door a few minutes later, and as he comes out he turns to me and mugs this dramatic face and is like, “They kicked me out!!”

2) A big group of people come to order but ask about quick stuff, and when I ask them, it turns out they’re playing a nearby music bar and their cover band event had actually caught my eye, and so I pull out my smartphone and show them a picture of me with some serious rock and roll memorabilia of the group they cover, and they say that I should come by, but I say that I work too late and I could only come over for the very last part and it isn’t worth the money to get in, and when they hear that, they’re like, “We can put you on the list.”

So, I tell them my name, and, they do!

(It was kind of awesome.)

Also, they were waiting for one band member for a while, and I was like, “He has to be the drummer,” which made them laugh, since it wasn’t the drummer, the drummer was already there, but it totally is a thing that a drummer would do.

The calm and quick response of the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM) post-doc who I know from around town…

…when he approvingly mentions his visit to this one (horrible) (yuppie-ish) (gay) neighborhood in the city that I used to live in, and I’m like, “Why do you like that place? It’s where old gays go to die”:

“I know, that’s why I like it, I need money.”

Stories of my mailman, about the (Amish).

My one (West African) mailman goes decently frequently to the one (Amish) town with the one restaurant that I went to with two (Brazilians), and when I had told him that we went to that restaurant, he was saying that we should have gone during the day to do shopping there around town and at local farms nearby.

And, he also was saying that you see things like you wouldn’t believe, like one time he saw Amish roadrage, where this young guy was going slow in a buggy and this older guy came out in his buggy and passed him on the left, and he started cursing him out and being like “I know your father” and “I’ll kick your ass” and saying all sorts of swear-words like you wouldn’t believe, and he went to go get his phone and record it because it’s one of those things that you wouldn’t believe if you didn’t see it yourself, but his wife reached out and stopped him from doing it.

He also says you can get good cheese for popcorn there, and once he got a huge thing of ribs, and it was so much cheaper for those ribs than anywhere else you could get locally, like for $65 or $75 dollars versus three hundred, or something ridiculous like that, and the quality is great, too.

Deceptive customer.

A while ago at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, a (lady) on the phone calls up and wants to place a to-go order for a few items, and she requests this one specific fried rice with chicken and shrimp in it and like a tom yum soup mix mixed in as flavoring, but she wants to know if it’s spicy – it isn’t, I explain, just a little bit, but nothing too crazy – and also she then wants the sauce on the side, which I then say I don’t think is possible but I can check, and then she says no, it's okay, you can mix it in.

Then, this (like early 60s) (non-descript) (white) woman shows up, and she opens up the food to look at it when we bring the take-out out, and when we go to ring her up, the price catches her attention, and she suddenly starts asking don’t we sell side orders – we don’t – and then she’s like, “Uh, this rice is too spicy, I told the person who ordered not to order anything spicy for me, but they must have made a mistake…”

At this point, the (Thai) (female) owner with the tired face has happened to step outside towards by us for something else, and everything catches her attention and she talks through the woman’s concerns and she directs her to a standard chicken fried rice for a lesser price, so she orders that instead for her and voids the other fried rice order, and then after she leaves, she starts telling me to move people to that, if they have a concern about spice.

“But she didn’t,” I was like, “She was lying.”

And, I explained that she was the person who ordered over the phone, I recognized her voice, but she must not have liked the price and so she lied in order to make something up and get out of paying for the order.

My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was in and out for bits of this, and she later said that I should always say the price at the end of the order, which I agreed with, but I said there were so many clarifications and special requests that I forgot to do it, and besides the difference was just like $2-3 with what she ultimately ended up paying.

“And besides, she has a menu in front of her when she placed the order because she was asking me very specific questions over the phone, how was I supposed to know that she wasn’t looking over at the price for the items that she was asking about?”

“Cheap Chinese food,” my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was like, solemnly. “She expect cheap Chinese food, and the price surprise her.”

A local homeless man…

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

As I go to lock up the patio furniture, a (middle-aged) (black) homeless guy with a prominent bald spot is sitting on a ledge of the next storefront over, and he’s sitting there still but also moving funny and tottering a bit, and while I’m out there he slumps off the ledge and lands on the concrete, where he tries to push himself up and his arms and legs are all sticking out like a crab’s and he’s heaving himself up trying to get his body off the pavement, but he can’t, and his arms and legs give under, and he just lies there, until he rolls over on one side and opens his zipper and takes out his dick andd starts peeing right there, the urine hitting the sidewalk beside him and following the slight incline downwards in parallel to how his body is lying.

I then go inside and call the police and inform them of the situation but specify that they shouldn’t send police, but like a social worker or something – “We don’t have that,” the person on 911 responds, when I mention it a second time – and then after I hang up, our one (dramatic) (white) (female) (townie) delivery driver says that she has seen that guy sitting out there all night, and finally when the cops come, one comes into the restaurant afterwards for some food, and he says that the guy is from the adjoining sister city and was super drunk, and there was no way he could have made it home that night, so it was good that we called, because now they’re taking him to a hospital where he can sleep it off.

When I go outside later, too, there’s like two plastic flasks of whiskey on the ground, but oddly no real visible urine marks, although the weather is on the cold side and there was no way it could have dried up that fast.

A schtick on job training…

…at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, when my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones was overseeing the training of the (Thai) owners’ middle daughter on how to key in orders on the electronic ordering system:

When I ask her how it’s going and she says good, I tell her that no matter how good she does, her parents won’t get a good report unless she gives a $50 bribe to our one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones.

“That’s how it works around here,” I was like.

I then mentioned our one (younger) (taller) (Latino-American) coworker, and I’m like, “You know [his first name] and how everyone around here likes him? That’s because he gave [our older coworker’s first name] a **hundred** dollars.”

I then specified that it didn’t have to be cash, it could be a giftcard for a local chain supermarket that she goes to, and I was like, “And fifty is the minimum, you can always go higher,” to the great delight of my older coworker, and the continuing mild confusion of the owners’ middle daughter.

“And remember, this isn’t a bribe,” I was like, in closing, “It’s a gift, it’s a gift because she taught you so well.”

A visit to the local university butcher shop.

Since they sell large flats of eggs to people but don’t have packaging for people to break them up into more manageable and carryable amounts, a long time ago they mentioned in their weekly mass-email that you could save your clean dozen-egg containers and bring them in, and they’d keep them there for people who needed them.

So, for a long while I was saving my dozen-egg containers – I usually eat an egg a day, for protein – but since I hadn’t been into the university butcher shop for a while, I had like a big tall stack of like over ten of those to bring in, when I finally went in again.

And, I wasn’t sure if they were still collecting them, but the manager guy there told me to set them on a small table in the corner, and before I left, I saw a woman grabbing them and using them to repackage eggs from a large flat of eggs that she had boughten.

That same maanger also checked a back cooler for me for a specialty sausage that they had made a few weeks ago and were still advertising in their email as on hand, although he said they were running low on it and maybe even out… 

But, as it turned out, they had like 3 of those left, and I bought 2 of them from the 3 of them that he found, in the back cooler.

He said, too, that they’d be making sausage more regularly again this year, since they finally have someone on staff who knows the machines and can supervise student usage, which they hadn’t had for a while, now.

A trip to a restaurant in a(n Amish) area with two (Brazilians)…

…on my last day that I have my rental car from my trip:

The one (nerdy) (worked-out) (STEM) (Brazilian) who’s a coworker of the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM) post-doc who I know from around town has never tried macaroni and cheese, so he gets some from the buffet.

And, as it turns out, he hates it, and he says that it’s weird and milky and has no taste.

As we finish the meal, too, in this big bright hall of families dining and scattered (Amish) customers and workers, I ask the two of them what they think, and the one (nerdy) (worked-out) (STEM) (Brazilian) says that the entire time that he’s been inside the restaurant he’s felt like he’s in a horror movie, and when I ask him why, he says that it’s like the beginning of a horror movie, where your car breaks down in this small strange out-of-the-way town and you have to spend the night.

Then, when we leave the restaurant, I can’t find the proper exit to the street, and as I loop the rows of parked cars, we see that one fence at the far end of the restaurant is devoted to horses and buggies, all tied up in a line there.

So, as we leave the restaurant and go to drive home through all of these small towns that we had passed on the way there, too, “Let’s go to a scary bar,” says the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM) post-doc who I know from around town, 

Then, at one in the town one out from where we live, a (crazy) (young) (local) homeless woman comes into the bar and picks up his accent and tries to start talking to him in (Spanish).

“It is always awkward, when people speak Spanish to Brazilians,” the one (nerdy) (worked-out) (STEM) (Brazilian) turns to me and says, at that.

A small bit of drama upon returning my very mildly-damaged rental car…

…that had been damaged from my backing into a parking garage spot and (inadvertently) the edge of a post there that had scraped my rear bumper and made a side panel pop out, which I dutifully reported right away in case insurance eventually needed to cover repairs for it, even though it was borderline damage and the rental car people when reviewing it in person weren’t quite sure either if it really rose to the level of needing repairs:

The (older) (female) (black) manager is out doing something in the lot a ways away from where I parked and where we’re standing and the one (younger) (black) (male) employee who looked at it yells to her about the damage and that it doesn’t look too bad, and when he mentions the side panel issue and how it had popped out some, she shouts across the lot, “Can you put a finger in?”

. . .

(You couldn’t.)

. . .

(They seemed to let it slide, but because I had made a report to the larger rental car agency about the damage in case I needed to file an insurance claim at some point, I had some confused later communications with them, since they assumed from my filing a report that there was indeed some repair amount that they needed to recoup from me.)

Re-birth experience.

I was thinking recently about how intense my experience was with my one huge discovery about the one ancient language that I’ve been studying now for a number of years, and how it was like this gigantic thing in me that I couldn’t get out, until finally I did, and how I felt like death was chasing me, and how I had the weird experience where I missed learning about getting into the path of the total solar eclipse that was happening near me, where people I knew were going but somehow I didn’t know that it was “a thing” until it was too late for me to go, and how it was like some weird collusion of the universe to keep me from going there, perhaps to protect me while I was in a liminal state.

Thinking back to then and before then, I really am like a new person, where I’m on the other side and I’ve transferred state into just another level of expertise and discovery and being, even if it’s not getting recognized yet or if anyone else feels it as palpable like I do.

Before then I had more doubts about the overall path that I was on, whereas now it’s frustration about lack of particular recognition or an immediately viable professional pathway, but my confidence in what I’m narrowly doing is just a given, no questions asked or tolerated.

It's like I've just shifted irrevocably into a different and higher level of knowledge and action...

It's so weird.

Small red onions at the farmer’s market.

Towards the last few of the farmer’s markets this year, I bought some small red onions from the one (older) (female) (Lao) vendor who I know, since she didn’t have any usual items that I would buy from her and I wanted to buy something.

And, I didn’t buy like the whole little greenish paper tub full because there was no way that I could use that many red onions, but just like a small handful of them, for which she charged me almost nothing.

And yet, I was so surprised at how tasty and flavorful they were, when I cut them up in my salads – just levels beyond any ordinary onion.

You would think that there wouldn’t be that much difference with flavors across onions, but there is.

It made me wonder why I had passed them over so much before…

I won’t make that mistake again.

Ayurveda in my hair.

I thought that I had one shampoo bar in waiting in the storage-shelving in my bathroom in my back-alley cottage in the college town where I live now, but it turned out to be a handmade soap-bar that I had gotten somewhere a while ago, perhaps through a coupon sale, so, the next time that I was at the local co-op, I went to go get a shampoo bar from any of the brands that I like, only to discover that they only had one in stock, this one big brown one made by someplace in California that I had never seen before.

And, since I really needed it, I just went and bought it.

It was only after I washed my hair and I started smelling like patchouli that I fished the wrapper out of the trash and looked at it, and I realized that it was some ayurvedic something-or-another.

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.”