Another day at my new job…

…at that one (Irish-y) burger joint on the first floor of the historic hotel, where I now work at:

1) The (big personality) (redheaded) (Irish-American) owner is saying that she had heard about the “no business that day” protest against ICE where people don’t go to school or work and also don’t do business or whatever, and she did consider closing down the restaurant for the day, but the protest method didn't make sense to her because it mostly just hurts the servers and staff by depriving them of income, and so she decided against it.

2) When a plate of nachos comes out across the kitchen service area and it’s for the owner, the one (younger) (plumpish) (hair streak-dyed) (mid-Southern) waitress is like, “Is that for [the owner’s first name]?”, and when they say yes, she’s like, “Then I’m going to have one,” and she grabs a nacho chip off the plate and eats it, before she heads off to go ferry it outside to her.

An evening at my new job.

I get the duty of plugging some of the ambiance-creating table lamps in to charge, and so I have to take them back to this curtained-off storage space back by the back kitchen entrance, to this little silver catering pushcart positioned under a power outlet to which is attached a massive phone charger cord terminal thing into which you can plug like twenty or so cords, since the table lamps have phone-like connectors and that’s how you plug them in every few days or so so they juice up and get sufficient electricity stored.

And, the way the cords just hang off and are tangled in these dense black tangles of wires that even extend down to lamps sitting on the lower shelves of the catering cart, it reminds me of something out of a sci-fi movie, like maybe the ship in Alien or something.

The busride home is driven by this (fat) (upper middle-aged) (pleasant enough) (African-American) driver who rides the break a lot, and since I don’t notice that at first and pinch the pressure point in my wrist, I end up getting super car-sick on the way home and I have to rest for like 40 minutes until I can feel normal enough again to go visit the one (gay) (Colombian) grad student who I know from around town, since he’s completely cleaning his apartment out since he’s graduated and moving away for an industry job.

“This is for you,” he’s like, giving me boxes of nutrition bars, “since you are in your protein era.”

I also get several shopping bags of stuff like shampoo and body wash and skincare lotion, in addition to much other food like a small dingy rigid cellophane-ish bag of these small baked shelf-stable cheese rings that are a regional specialty from where he comes from in (Colombia), where they are common snacks, he says.

Unexpected cup-cleaner.

A lot of days, I take in some tea, often herbal, to my new job at the (Irish-y) burger joint on the first floor of a historic hotel, and I do so in a ceramic-and-rubber-sleeved coffee holder cup that I think was a gift years ago from the one resthome that I used to work at.

I do this because I discovered that the air in that old building is dry “as f*ck,” as the kids say, and that if I don’t hydrate before and during my job, the air dries out my sinuses and seriously f*cks with me, even to the point of tipping my system over into developing another sinus infection.

Anyhow, I usually start off the tea with water that I boil at home, and then when I’m there, I usually refill it once or twice, mostly with scalding-hot water from the espresso-maker by the specialty coffee station, ever since the hot water nozzle on the coffee machine in "the server alley" there somehow got broken and then never fixed.

Anyhow, after doing that over the course of several weeks, I suddenly noticed that my ceramic cup looks gleaming white and almost brand new inside, apart from maybe some mild discoloration up towards the drinking-edge of the mug where water never touches or sits for any length of time.

That extremely hot water must have scalded off the tea-stains!

That must be it, I suspect.

New job developments.

So, it’s been interesting, to adjust to the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel that I now work at.

There’s no more free meals, although we do get a 50% discount off of 2 drinks and 1 app and 1 meal every time that we work, so long as we order it just for ourselves and not for friends or anything like that, with some exceptions like with seafood since I started working there since seafood prices have gone up so much, so if we want that we have to pay full menu price.

The menu is also huge, which means that it’s going to take me a while to eat through it and try everything, with the coffee cocktails being an especial challenge since I work mostly nights and there’s no way I’m going to have shit with espresso in it at 9 or 10pm at night, I’ll have to wait and try those on days when I work lunch shifts and can hang around after work and I have time to sip a cocktail and let the caffeine course through me at a reasonable time of day when it will have worked itself out of me by nightfall.

Quite oddly at first, they insist that you never leave a tip on anything you order there whether after-shift or when you’re just there with people you know, since they split tips and it would just go back into the pool anyways.

(I did that on the rare occasions that I was at the [Thai] restaurant outside of work hours and bought something there.) 

Also, I’m starting to get my banter together. Like, if people say it looks nice, I praise the lighting and say it’s awesome, it covers up my wrinkles and takes 5 years off me, and I also offer to show them around the different rooms that we have…  Different rooms are better suited for cocktails or for big groups or for receptions, so why not show people around if they’re interested? You’ll never know what will turn into business, down the road… 

Like, one (mid-50s) (tastefully-dressed) (white) lady perked up at the reception room, since she turned out to be a realtor and she said that this group that she’s part of the leadership for is always looking for new places to hold networking events, while this (young) (black) (female) and (cleancut) (white) (guy) who come in and order Sprite and hold hands looked at each other meaningfully, when I showed them that same room and listed how among other events people have held wedding rehearsal dinners there.

I also make sure to point out the room with the couches by the window, and say that people sometimes just get drinks and that’s nice for that, and at that point I remind them that our specialty coffee station is always open and does decaf stuff, too, like if they’re out and about and want to pop by for drinks or a coffee after a movie or event downtown or something.

I’ve also discovered that people don’t look through all of the (lengthy) drink menu that we give them, usually they just look at just the obvious parts at best, so I have now made sure to show people the pages where the dessert cocktails and coffee cocktails and specialty coffees are listed, so they know that those are options for them if they want them.

I mean, if people get 2 dessert cocktails, that’s like $25 more of sales right there, plus it bumps up the total that people will tip off of, too.

So, why not take a minute and point that out. 

New job.

So, the new job that I work at is a(n Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel, and it really is something.

Because they had to retrofit the business into the available space, it has all these twisty corridors and rooms upon rooms of dining spaces, and there’s oddities, too, like different storage areas being in the basement next to our locker room and the several additional bathrooms that are there, too, although a basement social area is also down there for the elderly residents who live up on the upper floors of the building.

“This is the boom-boom room,” my one (eccentric) (blonde) (semi-manger) coworker was like, as she gave me the tour and gestured to one of the bathrooms down there.

Then, she spelled it out, that you can use the customer restrooms upstairs in the burger joint if you need to take like a pee, but anything heavier or more extended than that, you should really take the time and come downstairs and use the restrooms down there, because you don’t want to do anything upstairs that would bother the customers.

Overall, the burger joint is really a nice place, with split tips and a premium on a healthy respectful work culture, and plus they have specialty coffee and cocktails that I could maybe train into, to get like serious bartending and barista stuff on my resume in the long-term.

Plus, I have to take a bus to get there, and at night there’s like all this soft lighting that does wonders for me and takes like 5 years off of my face, and it feels like I’m somehow going into the big city to work.

The (big personality) (redheaded) (Irish-American) owner told me that she gets that a lot, that people come in there at night and they say that they feel like they just walked into somewhere in [one city] or [another city] or [a third city] (i.e., one of the 3 major cities that are a few hours drive from us).

It’s really crazy, too, because I first came in there during the afternoon to drop off my resume, and I simply didn’t expect that change in environment to occur from daytime-into-evening hours, in terms of how elegant and cool the space looks.

Joke of a friend…

…when I accidentally texted them the 4 digit code that gives you geotracked bus arrival info for the bus-stop near my cottage, instead of the transportation agency’s designated number (I was in such a rush that I didn’t realize that I had brought up the wrong contact info when I tapped on my text messages on my smartphone to open up what I thought was the transportation agency's contact info):

Incorrect PIN. Please try again.

. . .

(. . .)

A dream from like half a year ago –

Like half a year ago, I dreamnt –

I am sitting and eating from a large glass bowl of Dum-Dums, and I keep biting through them and chewing them, just eating Dum-Dum after Dum-Dum after Dum-Dum, although they are almost like Tootsie Roll pops with a chewable center, too, with the texture when you bite into them.

. . .

(. . .)

Potential dual citizenship.

I’m gathering docs again for my second dual citizenship attempt in a different (European Union) country – the first one got derailed since standards changed when I had already applied, and I didn’t get grandfathered in and it’d be a long and nightmarish and uncertain process to reapply, to the point where my lawyer for the first country said that it'd be better to try the other route, and he doesn't even take cases like mine anymore – and anyhow, what is striking to me is that the issuance dates of a lot of my vital records for submission are from FIVE YEARS AGO.

That’s how long it’s taken, and I haven’t even submitted for my second attempt yet since I’m still learning that other language well enough to pass a speaking interview at the consulate...

If only I had known about my eligibility during the 2010s when the requirements were less and the process was quicker... Like so much of my life, mistimed, and bad luck.

Moments from a (Brazilian) party.

The one (worked-out) (STEM) (Brazilian) who I know through people invited me to come along to a party some other (older) (Brazilians) were throwing for a visiting scholar, so I met him at his place, and right away when he saw me, he picked a little bit of citrus-cell out of my hair, from my squeezing out lemons and limes into my left hand and rubbing it into my hair like I always do for highlights on most days, only I must have accidentally not combed that bit out that morning when I had done it.

“Shared location with [his dead partner’s name],” he suddenly said in the Uber, pursing his lips and gloomily looking down at the app, and then not saying anything more at all.

The (vivacious) and (warm) (Brazilian) wife of the couple who hosted the party had someone bring over a karaoke machine and we all did that at the end of the night, too, and my selection of “Mandy” was very popular, with everyone who was like over forty singing along, loudly, including all of the (Brazilians) there.

Only, the (worked-out) (STEM) (Brazilian) had never heard it – he’s like thirty – and so I had to explain to him who Barry Manilow is, including how he got his start playing piano in gay bathhouses for Bette Midler.

And, he thought that singing at bathhouses was just the greatest thing ever.

“I want to do that,” he was like.

(He sings and runs a samba band in his spare time.)

Mall excursion.

When I bussed up to the local mall to go get some workclothes for my new job – I needed black pants, and not the khaki pants like I had been wearing at the one (Thai) restaurant that I used to work at – I had gotten them and was back on the bus on the ride back, and when we were just leaving the mall and going to a bus stop by one parking lot facing the back of some endless mini-malls and some people were boarding there, off like thirty-to-forty feet away off into the parking lot was a (taller) (thin) (black) (homeless) man with a presumably stolen shopping cart, stacked up with stuff and from he which he removed several bundles and ran over to the bus to board, entering all out of breath from running over so hard so that he could just get there in time so that it wouldn’t leave without him.

And, when he sat in a seat over by me, then, I leaned over and said something about how he was leaving his shopping cart back behind there.

“Oh, that?”, he was like, “That’s just odds and ends. Maybe they can help out somebody else.”

Addendum.

When I told the one local (young) (female) bartender with (pussy hat) energy about my getting a new job so quickly, she said that she was never worried about me with that, since I had had a “serious” job at the one (Thai) restaurant that I used to work at, and that I present well to boot.

It’s really amazing how I had gotten in there at just the right time when there was a worker shortage coming out of the pandemic, and how that’s refreshed my service industry resume now by giving me recent experience, and not only that, but a really nice resume-line since I was there for over 3 years, which is an eternity in that sector.

Resume call-backs.

My resume call-backs were three for three, although the third one took a while, since it was for a business that wasn’t open yet and had an uncertain start date when I dropped my resume off there.

That’s pretty good, and it reminded me of exactly why I disengaged from the academy/non-profit/editing cluster of jobs and had struck out into eldercare in the first place, after finishing my advanced degree and looking around into sectors that I could potentially move into at that point…  I just didn’t want to be one of those people with low job mobility, stuck in a job that they hated.

Months and months later, well into my new job, I was out drinking across the street at the one nearby (old) (townie) bar with my one (bohemian) (artist) coworker, and he had gotten talking to this older guy, and when I was telling him my situation and how I have an advanced degree and write stuff but I work as a waiter for my dayjob, he understood it immediately, and was like, “Freedom,” and when I said that most people don’t understand that and I then asked him how he understood it so quickly, he said that independence has always been important to him, and that’s why he was a carpenter/tradesperson/contractor-type person for so many years, he just didn’t want to get stuck anywhere, and he'd rather do things for himself...

Any how, all in all, it was exactly 2 weeks from my quitting to my starting training shifts at a new job.

Not bad at all!

A sign of trust.

My one (newer) (taller) (Thai) ex-coworker texted me out of the blue, to see if any of the (Brazilians) that I know have like 2 specific banking apps on their phone, since her (Brazilian) ex-husband wanted to send her a hundred dollars for their daughter’s birthday party, but there was all sorts of mandatory delays for the apps he uses and he didn’t have the necessary ones set up and if he used a bank there’d be expensive transfer fees.

So, I checked and they didn’t have those specific apps, but I offered to loan her the hundred dollars if she really needed it for the birthday party, which she said she might need, but let her check on some other stuff first, and finally she figured something out and she was able to get the money from her ex-husband after all.

Overall, though, it felt like it was just some level of trust between us, which I found very touching, for her to turn to me like that.

Oranges in the wintertime.

It’s always amazing to me how good the taste is of oranges in the wintertime.

Maybe it’s because I eat a lot of stuff like soup and potatoes and I have snacks of popcorn and like salads of kale and raw onion and stuff dowsed in some oil and much vinegar, but there’s just something that happens where I just really want an orange sometimes, and then I get one and they taste just so good.

Maybe it has to do with like my limited seasonal diet or like Vitamin C deficiency or something, but I’ll tell you what, whatever the reason is for it, they do just taste simply amazing, when I finally get some.

It's like I wolf them down and can't stop eating them. 

Two developments with home-goods:

1) The oil in my scent diffuser is not only getting lower bit by bit – something fun to watch, as I’ve never had one before – but the color of the oil inside is also gradually becoming a dark pinkish-purple, probably because the diffuser sticks are touching here and there some of the plastic flowers that are there among them to make it look like a decorative flower arrangement, and the dye there is probably being conveyed back down through those black porous sticks all the way into that glass-bosom reservoir holding all of the oil, and marking it.

2) I put water into an off-brand dijon mustard container, to shake it and create mustard-y water using all of the last mustard in the squeeze-tube, and then I put that into my lentil soup, which it makes super-tasty to an astonishingly surprising degree, to the point that I want to now do this with all my lentil soups in the future.

A gift from my mother that unexpectedly arrived in the mail:

A 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle that’s a picture of the Trevi fountain.

“I thought it would be fun for you because it’s smaller than normal,” she was like.

. . .

(The puzzle was the dimensions of an ordinary puzzle that size, and the box was squarish and somewhat smaller than normal, but it gave no other indications of containing a jigsaw puzzle of a smaller size than is typical for those types of puzzles.)

Post-quitting feelings.

After quitting my job, I was catching up with my uncle on the phone, that's my dad’s younger brother, and, like many times as an adult, I’ve been amazed at his insights into people.

Like, when I told him very briefly the situation, right away he said that the problem was my one (Thai) boss’s “inadequacy.”

He had been in the corporate world a long time before his retirement, so I can only suspect that a lot of those insights come from his experiences there.

Overall, though, the aftermath of my quitting felt very good, like I made the right decision, although I was walking across the street on a Monday and I glanced out of the corner-of-my-eyes into the window, there, and there was my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker, working in the restaurant on what should have been her day off.

On astrology.

The New York Times recently had an article about a museum exhibit about the history of astrology that had this interesting comparison:

Alexander Boxer, the author of “A Scheme of Heaven,” about the history and science of astrology, argues that horoscopes during antiquity have more in common with modern algorithms than with the esoteric predictions of many contemporary horoscope writers.

“It was a very technological and math-heavy field,” Boxer said in an interview. He compared people’s views of ancient astrology to our modern relationship with artificial intelligence, which he said… also “offers advice via opaque data-driven algorithms that you, the end user, are expected to trust but not to understand.”

Just a very, very incisive comparison.

Additionally, when I sent that article to my one (Mormon) colleague who I do a summer book-club with, he texted back:

Thanks for the article. Quote: “According to Allied Market Research, a consulting firm, spending on astrology-related products and services is projected to increase from $12.8 billion in 2021 to $22.8 billion in 2031.”

How do we get in on that?

. . .

(. . .) 

A (Brazilian) insight on (English).

Several times I heard the one (worked-out) (STEM) (Brazilian) remark to (Brazilian) friends that people say the word "cute" in (English) about grown people who they find attractive.

"Cute?", he was like, "Cute is a baby! I am hot." 

An Easter conversation with my mother.

She says that she went to the Tomb of the Holy Sepulcher, back on an around-the-world trip that she did with two other girls, back when she worked as a stewardess.

And, they had to wait for some people to come out so that they could go in, but it wasn't like the crowds that you see on TV, now. 

"I'm glad, I really wanted to tell you," she was like.

She also said that it's nothing that my father didn't remember that it was Easter Sunday, since they weren't doing anything special to celebrate and plus she only mentioned it to him once that day, in the morning.

It was also nothing that he forgot that my restaurant is always closed on Sundays, and that the previous day he had asked me if I was going to the big sports tournament game, which was held in another city and which would have been a major trip for me and which I had never said anything about at all, about going to it, instead I had just been saying that I had bought a sports-team t-shirt to wear at work for the game since we were encouraged to do that and it seemed like fun.

He just gets tired at the end of the day a lot, my mom says. 

Scholarly annoyance.

The big scanner just off the circulation desk room at the local university library is great for taking quick scans of huge oversize books... 

It has like this big moving arm up on top, that somehow swings out into the air over the book that you lay out below for it to capture, so you don't have to flip the book upside down onto a glass plate or anything like that.

But, if you have a book with glossy pages, all too often there's this line of brightness across the image that eradicates any of the text that was underneath, and it's hard to adjust the book so that doesn't happen, or so that it at least happens at a manageable level.

So, beware!

For this, books published by Brill particularly suck. 

Advice for sugarcoating your resume...

...if a potential employer presses you on why you left your last job, per the one (older) (white) (female) (townie) bartender at the local brewery:

Just say "it became a toxic environment," and leave it at that.

. . .

(She says that those words do wonders nowadays, and it says everything and people won't go into it, though of course I should first say like I was planning to do anyways something innocuous like "I'd been there a while and it was time for a change," this is just if they press you on it like they don't believe your reason, this is a good thing to say then.) 

News of a death:

Around the turn-of-the-year, since I haven't visited the one resthome that I used to work at for a while and since the one resthome resident who used to give me candy didn't look too good on my last visit -- walker, oxygen, sitting a bit out-of-it in a chair when I arrived -- I look online for an obituary and I don't find one, so I jot her a note about how I hope that she's doing well, I had taken longer vacations to see my parents and for a conference and I hadn't had a chance to come by recently, etc. etc. etc., all very light and cheery, since who knows where she is, healthwise, and in big letters, too, so she can read it, and I throw it in the local mailbox like a block away from my house.

And, like a week after that, I pick up my mail and there's a medium-sized envelope that was delivered and sitting amidst my daily newspaper, and I pitch it on my kitchen table and I don't look at it closely until I get home that night from something, and then I look at the return address label and it's my old (white) (gay) (Midwestern) (retirement-age) coworker at the resthome, so I get a feeling that she died, especially since the envelope is large-ish, and I open it up, and right there is my returned letter and a card from him saying that she passed away a few months ago with her nephew and niece there, and he tucked in his Christmas newsletter about him and his partner.

And, I remember that I had phone trouble the very day that I last visited her, so I look it up on my phone, and the last date that I visited was exactly a year to the day that I got the letter from him, returning my letter and saying that she had died.

A life regret:

If I had known that I would end up as a bohemian dropout, I wish that I would have dropped out sooner, like in the mid-2010s or whatever -- no professionalization or unionization initiatives in higher ed, no great attempts to recalibrate career sectors, just go be a waiter and be done with it, all the way back then.

That would have given me another 4 years of productivity, versus all of the time and energy that I put into things that just had no pay-off. 

Like, I've been on my current path for like what now, 5-6 years?

Imagine where I could be now, if I had had that extra 4 years head-start. 

Comment to landlord, and delayed response.

Earlier this year I made a preliminary inquiry to my landlord about potentially trying to put a bathouse on the property, to attract bats and maybe cut down on the local mosquito problem.

And, he was nice about it, but it was "a hard no," he said, because bats can get in the attics of old houses like the front house and just wreak incredible damage, there.

Like a few months later, though, during a mid-winter thaw when all of the snow had melted away everywhere, he came over to the property, and I saw him up on the roof of my cottage, clearing its gutters of leaves.

. . . 

(Mosquitos often breed in such spaces.) 

Job application preparation irony:

I use the wi-fi at the local brewery and have a beer, as I take an online certification about state intoxication laws.

. . .

(. . .)

Another angle on quitting.

Part of the reason I have worked in eldercare and then in restaurants the past number of years is because I want a pleasant, low-stress, and predictable job where I can have a steady income stream and clock in and clock out and preserve my time and headspace for writing.

Walking on eggshells around a boss is incompatible with that -- -- -- and so, as soon as he changed the balance of the workplace like that, I was out.

Done. 

Aftermath of quitting...

...like five days after I quit my one job at the one (Thai) restaurant where I used to work at, in the college town that I now live in: 

As I walk to the one local coffee shop to go have a late afternoon coffee and use their wi-fi, I glance down the storefronts on that street, and there in the window of the (Thai) restaurant is their bright pale orange Plasticene sign soliciting applications for servers and delivery drivers, which they haven't had up for a while.

An example of historically unpleasant behavior...

...by the (husband) (Thai) owner of the one (Thai) restaurant where I used to work at:

It's a busy shift and I'm coming back with dishes and putting them in the dish-tubs and the bell rings for food, and I go to wash my hands because they're filthy before I pick up the food, and the (husband) (Thai) owner is there and asks why I didn't come right away when the bell rang, when the bell rings you come pick up the food, and I say that I had to wash my hands first, and then he says why did I have dishes anyways when I needed to pick up food, and I say that I already was in the middle of bussing them when the bell rang...

. . . 

(Just stuff like that...  When I told that to the one (older) (white) (female) (townie) bartender at the local brewery, she got this displeased look on her face and is like, "He was talking to you like a child," and I said yes, but it was only every few months or so in very very short interactions where you didn't even need to respond most of the time, you just nodded and went along with what you were doing...  Sometimes, I added, he didn't even make any sense, like once when I was working on a two-person lunch shift and we were absolutely slammed, he said that to manage tables we had to divide them so one person helped one table and the other person helped another, which made absolutely no f*cking sense and would actually have been more inefficient than what we were doing, the problem is that there was such a glut of people that 2 servers couldn't handle it all at once, sometimes restaurants are like that...)

Addendum addendum.

Like earlier last year, the (husband) (Thai) restaurant owner said something in the back to my one (Chinese from China) ex-coworker, and he was upset afterwards, and you could see tears actually forming at the edges of his eyes, he was so angry and so distraught from what the boss had said to him.

And, I didn't get into it with him, but I said that the boss was sometimes like that and that I just let it roll off my back, etc., but multiple people were **shocked** when I told them that story, when I was considering quitting and ultimately did quit.

It was just that abnormal to them, where I had been normalized into accepting and excusing that behavior from an employer, although perhaps in that particular case it was in part due to my not observing the actual interaction between them and not knowing exactly what went on, although that said, there's no reason anyone should come away feeling like that after an interaction with someone. 

Addendum.

With people who are bullies, you should never engage them on the level of the content, because what they think and do is ultimately only very loosely if at all connected to what you do, and they'll invent and distort reality to fit and justify their chosen behavior.

But, as I have always told other co-workers, if all of us were that stupid like the (husband) (Thai) restaurant owner assumed during his occasional corrections of our behavior, that restaurant would never be able to function, at all. 

Prehistory to quitting (1 of 2): November.

As more prehistory to my quitting, during the cold snap in early winter it was the same weekend early afternoon shift that can be slow, and it was slower than usual with dine-in although there was a lot of takeout orders, and suddenly 3 different tables came in all at once, first one and then like five minutes later 2 others.

And, my coworker was in the back doing takeout -- only one of us can be in the kitchen at once, and at least one person has to be outside -- and I went to help one table, and then the table right next to them that I had checked on a few minutes earlier wanted help right then so I took their orders, too, which actually turned out to involve a lot of special requests etc. that we had to talk through, and then I went to the front to return menus and type both orders in, and then something happened where it turns out that one of the rarer and stupider delivery apps where you have to actively confirm the order by hand had had an order for an expensive dish waiting for like 6 minutes, and the phone rings and it's the (husband) (Thai) restaurant owner and he was mad because he had looked at something and seen the cancellation, and he was mad that I wasn't behind the counter to confirm it and so the customer had cancelled the order.

(For some reason, the order later reappeared and it went through as normal, so who knows what that whole thing was about.)

So, he said sharply in so many words that I was fucking off by the front host stand and I had to explain to him that I was helping customers by typing in orders at the host stand -- "But there were no tables," he was like -- and then I had to explain that we suddenly had 2 tables and it was one of those things where they both needed help at once -- -- but, "Why did you go there and not to the back," he was like -- and, I explained to him that I was returning menus from the customers to the front host stand like we usually do, so I used the computer there --and, he didn't say much, then, but, he still seemed displeased and he said that I should stand at the back more during that particular shift, to help out with takeout orders.

And, that was reasonable, so I said that I would, and I did that from then on, during that particular shift.

Prehistory to quitting (1 of 2): August.

As prehistory to my suddenly quitting, like in August before I went to go visit my parents, I was picking up an exceptional amount of shifts and I worked a huge number of days in a row, including 2 doubles, and including one evening when I was supposed to be off but the (Thai) (husband) restaurant owner wasn't feeling well and they asked me if I could come in and I did that as a favor to everyone, as one more favor before other people started picking up extra because they had to cover for me on my vacation.

And, like 2 days before my vacation I was getting stressed from all that I was working and I didn't feel like being at work again and I was in the middle of all of these arrangements because I was heading out of town for 2 weeks, and the (Thai) (husband) restaurant owner sees me discreetly checking my phone for an email, and he immediately and sharply gets on me for doing that, with no recognition whatsoever of how much I had been working for him during the past week or that just 2 days earlier I had even come in on my day off as a special favor to him personally.

And, that really rubbed me the wrong way, and my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker could see how pissed I was and she tried to calm me down, but I said that I was finished bending over backwards to do favors for them, and from then on I was doing my minimum number of shifts each week, no more working extra for people, that I'd swap shifts around if people wanted me to, but no more extra.

I also started looking around at like 1-2 places for potential jobs to replace or taper off shifts at the (Thai) restaurant because it was starting to feel like I was tired of it because I had been there too long, but soon I got busy with fall conference preparations and everything fell by the wayside, and the lesser amount of shifts each week gave me distance from there and it started working for me better again, to keep working there.

A very sudden and unexpected end to my job...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I have been working for more than 3 years, at the one college town that I now live in:

I get in on a Saturday afternoon and when the (husband) (Thai) restaurant owner shows up, it's like his very very occasional behavior that he does to everyone where he doesn't know what's going on and he acts like you're stupid and he says that you need to do something other than what you're doing at the moment or why aren't you doing that etc. -- all very momentary things done very very very occasionally to everyone, that people roll their eyes at -- but it's like he shows up and he's controlling and he wants to show me that I'm not doing my job, with his first interaction being his asking me why I'm not standing behind the counter when my coworker is there behind it and I'm hovering by the edge of it looking to see when customers lay down a credit card so I can take their bill up, and later at the slow part of the shift when there's one table (paid up) and no work and everything is done he sees me briefly and discreetly looking at my phone and he gets on me about that, and like oftentimes happens on that slow weekend afternoon shift when my one (older) (Thai) coworker is done eating her shift meal I go and eat mine from off of the top of the ice machine just inside the door to the kitchen and I have my phone out to look at something and while I stand and eat he passes by and he asks me why I'm doing that and why I'm not outside, and after I clock off at the end of shift and I am standing behind the counter with more Diet Coke in my travel coffee mug and I'm looking at my phone there to check a text message while I'm waiting for someone to get out of the bathroom so I can use it before I go, he passes by and sees that and he asks me to come into the office, and without yelling at me he says that he knows I work mostly with the tables but why am I not helping out more with takeout -- on a shift where everything was done! -- and that I have a problem with my phone and that it looks bad for customers if they look in the window and see me and that he knows that I need to eat but if I'm there and my coworker gets a call and someone walks in the door I won't be there to help them, and looking at your phone while you eat makes you take twice as long, and it's like he's just assuming the worst and not looking into facts and making up all of these hypotheticals to make it so I'm not doing my job, when it was a slightly slower-than-average shift where nothing exceptional happened and everything got done, and at most he saw me look at my phone once during an exceptionally slow period.

Like, made up stuff and just blown-out-of-all-proprotion stuff, and it just took me by such surprise that I just nodded and let it pass by like I would when he did stuff like that in small ways -- and where would you even begin with something like this, where it's like they're vigilant to invent reasons to go after you? -- and after I left I was upset and I talked to my parents and various friends and the (young) (female) (white) bartender with (pussy hat) energy at the local brewery -- "That's toxic," she was like, about his micro-managing counter-standing comment that he began the interactions with, and she said that she would quit that job -- and so I decided to sleep on it, and the next morning I realized that I had tension in my shoulders from thinking of being around the (Thai) (husband) owner, so I sent him a workplace app text that it had stopped working out for me to work at the restaurant and please mail me my last paycheck and my tax documents, and I texted my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker that I wouldn't be coming in to work in 2 hours because I had left, and then I deleted the workplace messaging app, and I immediately felt better, from knowing that I would not have to walk into that restaurant and see him again.

It's like I suddenly reached my limit, and my body was rejecting the idea of the employment there.

I didn't quite realize what had happened at first, but it was like a latent bully suddenly escalated their behavior and I didn't quite see it at first, since it was similar to what had gone before, albeit that it was of such a heightened nature that it caught me off guard and I immediately knew that something was off and that something was different.

And, I mean, I had noticed his behavior early on in my employment there and I had *never* liked it and there was always a certain amount of coolness between us, but I had been able to manage it for a period of multiple years, until suddenly I couldn't.

Just very, very surprising behavior from someone who you've known a bit for a period of over 3 years, but what can you do...  It was his decision to act like that, and as the one (young) (female) (white) bartender with (pussy hat) energy at the local brewery put it, you're an employee, not a punching bag, and I'm not there for him to take his issues out on me by targetting me and playing "gotcha!".

Once someone goes to that level with you, it poisons the relationship and you can't be around them. 

Mysterious apprehension methods for a local postal thief.

Earlier this year like mid-winter, I went to go get my mail and check to see if a small package from my mother came in, and since the package wasn't there yet, again, I called out to my one (West African) mailman who was up the street to see if he had delivered it yet, which he hadn't.

"Okay," I was like, "I had thought it was probably just late, but I wasn't sure, because maybe it was like a package theft off my porch or something."

And, I told him about the recent package thefts at my one (Chinese from China) coworker's building where the guy even had the postal key, and he immediately knew what I was talking about, and he said that they had pictures of him and were sharing them all around.

"And I can't say much," he was like, "But if you see posters for the public, don't believe what they say, but they are investigating this and they know exactly what is happening."

A Great Hunger.

Every once in a while, a great hunger seizes me, to read the one ancient language that I've been studying for quite a while now and have made myself into quite the expert in.

That hit me again just after the turn-of-the-year, and for like days on end I'd live to just pull out this one famous ancient text and a standard translation of it and do an initial read-through without consulting dictionaries, and I'd do that for like an hour or an hour-and-a-half every night, just getting fully and irrevocably absorbed in it until I had tired myself out and mentally could not read anymore.

It's like you forget the world... The best form of escapism. 

An unexpected return.

The biggest result of my counter-top popcorn air-popper?

I am buying locally-grown popcorn again.

For, it pops entirely in the air-popper, in a way that it simply would not when heated on the stovetop in oil.

Christmas revelations:

1) When I was on a quick trip back to the city that I used to live in, I was able to catch up with my one (half Sudanese) (half British) friend and her family, and she was telling me how her kids’ religious education is going, like how she’s exposing them to different religions and holidays and ideas, and how their one (nice) (female) (Kenya-born) (evangelical Christian) babysitter is also permitted to talk to them at an age-appropriate level.

And, a few weeks ago at dinner, her oldest daughter said something about Jesus being dead, and her middle son who’s like 4 or 5 just stopped everything right then and was like, “What, Jesus is dead?!”, and it was just the biggest news in the world to him.

When we went to go play Legos, too, I was looking for ideas about what to build, and his first suggestion was a cross.

2) When I was hanging out catching drinks with the one (nerdy) (worked-out) (Brazilian) (visiting PhD) student, he told me that his participation with (Afro-Brazilian) religions is really recent, and only goes back like this year.

After his partner died in a car-crash, he said, he actually was in another car crash where this motorcycle veered into his lane and his car and the guy flipped off the motorcycle and was hospitalized with severe injuries -- right then I almost wanted to say that it sounded like he was cursed, but something told me not to say that -- and anyhow he was absolutely hysterical and he was so distraught that he could cause other people a death like the one that he had just suffered, that he had even thought about going and killing himself, if the man passed away from his injuries.

And, out of nowhere, without him talking to anyone about this, this girl he knows gives him a call, and she says her uncle had called her and told her that she needed to call him immediately, and this uncle guy who doesn't even know him at all is in a(n Afro-Brazilian) religion, and that’s how everything started, with his friend the guy’s niece even getting into it through him.

We also did a few things over Christmas, too, and at a zoo he was drawn to the wolves howling, and at a museum he was drawn to the medieval armor, since his orisha bears attributes of war.

During various ceremonies, too, he said, he has had various spirits ride him, and some spoke and designated him as their child, although he says there’s a lot of stigma in (Brazil) against this sort of thing, since it’s (black) religion.

Some odd customers all in one night…

…during this one night during the week before Christmas this past year, at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) A table of four where it’s one (lower middle-class) (white) mom and her daughter and her boyfriend and some relative, only the daughter is trans and has this very flat female forehead and long straight female hair but also a scraggly blonde-brown beard, and the family relative seems not all there and orders a Mello Yello and then returns it because he doesn’t like it, and then when I ask, the mom specifies that nothing is wrong with the soda like the syrup is running out or the carbonation is wrong or anything like that, it’s just that he doesn’t like it, and so I go and I refund the soda for them.

2) A table of four where it’s like two (lower middle-class) (white) parents and their two (adult) (white) (nerd) sons, and one has long (trans?) hair and noise-cancelling headphones, and they speak so softly that I have to ask them “No ice?” after they say something after ordering a Thai iced tea – “I said, ‘A Thai iced tea would be nice,’” they repeat for me, then – and the other is (fat) and (hairy) and has a huge tablet out on the side of the table and is looking at something with video games and then like a chat message board, throughout the entire duration of the meal.

And, as I’m inputting their orders up by the host station, suddenly the mother is at my side, and I stop what I’m doing to ask her if she needs assistance, as I wonder if they decided to go and make a sudden change on their order or something.

“Are you open on the twenty-fourth?”, she’s like.

3) One table asks for boxes when they’re not even halfway done eating (!), and then when they leave, they hit the automatic handicapped door opener thing, and then after they pass through and turn around and see that the door is still paused open, they go and try to start pushing it shut.

4) A (mid 30s) (white) (lesbian) couple sit down, and when I take an order from the (fat) (arm-tatted) (butch) one, her voice is way too low, like she’s just starting on testosterone.

5) A woman at a table vaguely near the front door suddenly gets up and scampers over and without asking us at all starts trying to draw shut the thick ceiling-hung curtain that we pull open and maneuver around to keep drafts from the front door from bothering diners, when the weather gets like that.

6) When a table of three walks in – two (older) (shriveled) (college town-ish) (educated) (white) parents and their teenage daughter – I ask them if they're dining in or picking up and they say quite normally that they’re dining in, but when I then ask them how many, they suddenly don’t speak, and the wife just silently holds up three fingers.

7) When a(n early 30s) (alternative/yuppie) (white) woman orders a vegetarian dish, I ask her if it’s okay that there’s oyster sauce in there, and she’s like, “Is that vegetarian?”, and I tell her that for some people it is and for some people it isn’t, and then she’s like, “I want vegetarian,” so again I’m like, “For some people it is vegetarian, and for some people it isn’t,” and then she thinks for a few seconds, and declines the oyster sauce.

. . .

(That wasn’t the only stuff that was happening all night. I also got various coworkers to try on my holiday hat with reindeer antlers.)

An exchange, around planning.

When I was making plans to go back to the city that I used to live in and I was feeling out maybe hanging out with my one (professor) friend who studies (modern) (Czech) literature, she said that she was available on this one day, but it depended on what time her ex-husband picked up their daughter, and you couldn’t always plan around that since he’s “late and unreliable.”

“Sounds like the manuscript tradition of the Acts of Peter,” I was like.

Workplace drama.

So, a few months ago on like a Friday night, this (skinny) (mid-20s) (mustachioed) (light-skinned hispanic) guy with vaguely (hipster) clothing comes in through the front door and tells me quite normally that he's picking up, so of course I send him to the back counter, and after he leaves, it turns out that he was all weird and just super super quiet when he went back to the back counter, like he was practically whispering the woman’s name that he was picking up the order for, to the point where my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones and my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker had to ask him to repeat the name like two to three times, before they could finally hear what it was and give him the right order.

And, after he leaves, our one (younger) (taller) (skinny) (Latino-American) coworker comes over, and it turns out that the order was for his (cool) ex-girlfriend.

“I wonder if that’s her new boyfriend,” he was like, groaning.

So, we go and take the receipt and plug it into the system, and it kicks up her name and some guy’s name, and as he starts googling the guy to see who he is, we open up the order history for his (cool) ex-girlfriend and we can see that they’ve ordered together like three times, where she always eats the stir fry that she ate when she was with him, while the new guy was trying around a few  different dishes before finally arriving at eating the same thing as her.

And, I start making jokes like he should have left a note in the bag for her, and at first I say that he should be like, “I didn’t spit in the food,” but then I say that he should have bought a mango sticky rice and tucked it in there for them with a note to his ex being all like, “Enjoy this dessert, I thought you needed something sweet,” at my saying which our one (chubby) (Thai) coworker broke out in a smile and was like, “Yes, yes, that’s the one, you should write that.”

Our one (younger) (taller) (skinny) (Latino-American) coworker then had to go out on a delivery run, and then when he came back I told him that he had left one investigative thread undone – “I’m telling you this, to help you as a journalist,” I was like, since he has a history of working on student newspapers -- and when he wasn’t sure what that investigative thread was, I pointed out that they had both their names under her phone number, and so I pull up the order history under the guy’s name, which he hadn’t looked at since we had only pulled up hers, earlier, and it turns out that they had ordered together under his name like 3 times starting like 6-7 weeks after the break-up, before she shifted the ordering back to her name for the like 3 times extending through the order on that very night.

“September?!”, he was like, “September?!”.

And, he then stated his disbelief that she had started dating the guy so soon after their break-up.

“But when did you start dating that girl you’re seeing now?”, I was like, and he did some counting in his head, and he was like, “Yeah, I guess it was around then, too,” but then his mind turned back to the situation at hand and he still couldn’t believe it, and he was like, “September?!”.

I then suggested that he send our one (chubby) (Thai) coworker to go do pick-up in his name at the bar/restaurant where his (cool) ex-girlfriend works, and he liked the idea, but he said that he would send his current girlfriend instead.

“But what if they fight?”, I was like. “Who would win in a fight?”.

And, he said that his (cool) ex-girlfriend would win the war of words, but his current girlfriend is a boxer and she’d win any physical fight.

“Then she would win,” I was like. “In a situation like that, words ain’t shit.”

. . .

(Oddly, after this he let us in on a coworker backstory, too, that the one [white] [female] [townie] delivery driver was in the same boxing club that his current girlfriend is in, and she was even a national amateur champion or something.)

A New Year’s greeting exchange.

I texted the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM post-doc) who I know and his one (nerdy) (worked-out) (Brazilian) colleague a New Year’s greeting, in the one obscure language that they both know that I have been studying for potential dual citizenship purposes -

[“Happy New Year!” in that language]

and then I texted –

(That’s “Happy New Year1” in [name of the obscure language].)

- to which the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM post-doc) replied back –

Vai dar teu cu

And –

That’s HNY in guarani

- to the great amusement of his colleague on the conversation.

. . .

(I think that means “You’re going to give up your ass” in Portuguese.)

The jigsaw puzzle preference of a (well-dressed) (local) (older) (white) woman…

…who I meet at the “take one, leave one” jigsaw puzzle exchange table at the local public library, as we both look through what puzzles are set out there:

Her favorite ones are the ones with gridded squares like rows and rows of movie posters, she says.

. . .

(. . .) 

Addendum.

Like the next time I wear the reindeer hat to work, a(n older) (thin) (spectacle-wearing) lady who seems like a(n educated) (liberal) and who is in there with a man who appears to be her (husband) and whose face I vaguely recognize compliments me on it, and when I tell her that I made it myself, she says that I should do the same thing for other holidays, like one for Valentine’s Day and then one for Saint Patrick’s Day, etc.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking!”, I was like.

Build-up to Christmas this year…

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

1) The (Thai) (wife) restaurant owner with the tired face buys hunter green paper napkin rings to mix in with our typical maroon paper napkin rings, so that together they’re red and green and look like Christmas.

2) I debut my homemade Christmas hat, which is the same one that I put horns on for Halloween, only now I put on big brown construction paper antlers like a reindeer, since my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones said during Halloween that I should do that for Christmas.

Only, she seems super apathetic about my hat, which I remark on to a number of people, since she was the person who had encouraged me to do that, and then she goes and bes apathetic

“That’s because she’s jealous,” says the one (Thai) (wife) restaurant owner with the tired face.

3) A big table of like 6-7 people including a high chair come in, including this (older) (scrawny) (bearded) (white) man who seems both intense and vaguely out of it, like he waves for us and says that they’re ready to order, and he like takes offense when he orders a vegetarian dish and I ask if fish and oyster sauce is okay in that dish.

“It’s under vegetarian,” he’s like, confrontationally.

“Different people have different definitions and preferences and we try to respect them all, that’s why we ask” I was like.

“So is there any sauce at all?”, too, a (younger) (white) woman at the table asks, when she orders a similar vegetarian dish but wants it without fish and oyster sauce.

(The answer is yes, because we substitute for those if they’re in there… Somehow, we’ve never fielded that interpretation of the option before, though! So malleable is language.)

Later, too, when the kid in the highchair drops some food, the old guy looks at him all exasperated and is like, “Why did you do that?!”, which makes me wonder if he has some sort of early-stage dementia, since all of his behavior is so inappropriately calibrated to all of the audiences I’ve seen him interacting with, although the woman who might be his daughter seems odd, too, so who knows, it might just be a weird family.

4) At one point this (plump) (grad student-age) (darker-skinned) (South Asian) woman with big fluffed-out hair sits at a small table at the back, and I ask her to move to the waiting area at the side since it’s getting busy and tables are filling up and we might need that table for dine-in customers soon, and she seems confused but moves, and then later I see her sitting at another nearby small table with a menu and dine-in stuff set around her, which makes me realize that she must have slipped in without being seated and assumed that people sat themselves, and then eventually we must have realized what was going on and some of my coworkers must have brought things to her.

(She leaves a normal 15-18% tip on her meal.)

5) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker says that she’s tired from working so many days in a row, and I point to my antler hat and act like I’m a reindeer and am like, “You’re tired?! I had to drag around Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus all day in their sled, and they were heavy!”

A cold snap (2 of 2): Another day.

1) When I walk into work, it’s a new month and I have to get my new timecard ready, and when I go to put it in the timecard rack right there by the ice machine, there is my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker’s new timecard, and by the part where you fill in the month, she wrote -- -- -- “last month Dec.”

2) My one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones said it was just a slow-to-normal lunch shift that past Sunday, but so many people wanted hot water with their meals instead of normal water that we actually ran out of clean mugs that we could give them (we have like 18-20 or so).

A cold snap (1 of 2): One day.

1) I wake up early and shovel before going in to work a double shift, and by the time that I come back around to my cottage from the front of the house, there’s a thin layer of snow already back where I had begun.

2) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker calls in over the phone to order a duck soup and have it out and hot waiting for her so she can eat it before her shift starts, and I don’t recognize her voice over the phone, at first.

3) During my hourlong break, I want to go somewhere and get a hot coffee but it’s so cold, and so my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker who just got on shift says she’ll make me some good coffee with her various coffee contraptions that she’s brought into work, and so I just sit at a table at the side of the restaurant during my break and drink the coffee that she made me, without going outside at all.

4) The (new) (stoic-faced) (female) (Guatemalan) kitchen worker is coming back from the restroom and she pauses to look at these wrapped presents that we have up as like holiday decorations, and she pretends to take one for herself and walk away with it.

And, it’s the biggest one, so I remark on that in (Spanish), and she just smiles and is like, “Si” (“Yes”).

5) A very jovial (early 40s) (bearded) (South Asian) customer who’s visiting from out-of-town and eating out with his friend wants raw ginger with his tea, and so I say that we can do that for him but we request that he only put the ginger in his mug and not in the thermos, and I remind him of that again when I bring out the raw ginger, and he pretends to be confused and puts on a straight face and is like, “What, I need to put the ginger in the thermos?”, just to mess with me.

6) The one (smiley-faced) (Guatemalan) kitchen worker comes up to me and wants to know how you translate the phrase “Which one?” into (Spanish), and what it means.

7) By the end of shift, I’ve been at the restaurant all day, and I’d only been outside once, to take out the trash to the back alley dumpster as part of our end-of-shift duties.

8) At night in my cottage after I turn my lights off, I hear a loud crack from my nearby window like something could have snapped or possibly someone walked up outside and did something, and I leap up out of bed and go check that the front door is locked at 1:30am, including the outer screen door with its loose latch, and then I stay up a bit and look out through various windows and screens far away from the noise but from where I can obliquely see towards there, to make sure that everything is okay and that it’s not what I fear that it is.

Household hazard:

A small crumb-like object sitting out on my dining room table where I eat, and when I pick it up and put it in my mouth to try it, it somehow turns out to be a pebble.

. . .

(. . .)

Two recent dreams…

…that I had this past early winter:

1) Me and the one (lesbian) sister of my one (former) (assisted living client) with (disabilities) and I have second row tickets to see Paul McCartney at a smallish half-empty theater in town, and we’re hanging out towards the back with her girlfriend before the concert starts, since her girlfriend had only decided to come later and at that point that was the only ticket that she could get.

And, as we’re sitting there and talking, lights come up from behind the still-closed curtain, and you can see silhouettes of a band strewn about on raised pedestals coming through as music quietly strikes up, and as that happens, we both instantly stop talking and raise our heads and turn them towards the stage, and without even saying goodbye to her girlfriend, we just silently get up and walk towards the front of the house, to take our places.

2) I’m lying half-asleep in my bed in my bedroom in my little cottage in the one college town that I now live in, and my cat is lying next to me on the blanket and feels heavy there, so I shift positions and make it leap down onto the floor, where it runs around the room several times at high speed like a crazy person.

. . .

(I don’t have a cat.)

A challenge met with victory.

A few months ago at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I was getting some snacks out of the one snack-bin that we have now, and there was all these new kinds of candy in it.

“Oh, there’s new candy!”, I was like, and as my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones stood there, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker told me that they both had bought some new ones and put them in there, since the last time that I had worked.

And, “Do you know which candy I bought?”, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was like.

“Yes,” I was like. “It tastes sweeter.”

And, my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones smiled at the sexiness of that line, but my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker just let it go by and she was insistent, she wanted to know which ones did I think she bought.

“The mango gummies and the Hi-Chews,” I was like, quickly and without stopping to think.

And, I was right.

“How did you know?”, she was like.

“Because we’ve worked together for so many years now that we’re like an old married couple,” I was like.