A dream:

The other month I dreamnt –

It’s late evening or even night and I’m in a car being driven by my one (Chinese from China) ex-coworker from the (Thai) restaurant that I used to work at, and we’re passing up the street by the historic hotel where I now work at and a lot of my (new) coworkers are outside on the sidewalk and I turn my head away from them and I try not to look at them as I hope that none of them can see me and that if they do he doesn’t notice or they don’t call out to me or anything like that since the car-window is open, and also because no-one from my old job knows where my new one is at and it's a contest and I don’t want him to find out that way and win, it’s so sloppy of me.

. . .

(. . .)

A third day at my new job…

…at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel:

1) As I pass through a lounge, I hear my one (eccentric) (blonde) (semi-manager) coworker begin to explain some aspect of the beerlist to some guests in response to some question that they had asked, and she begins by prefacing everything with the caveat that she doesn’t know a lot about what’s on the list except for the lagers, “because I like beer-flavored beer.”

2) After my one (blonde) (make-upped) (college-age) coworker warns us that her family is coming in, her (heavier) (blonde) mom and her two (blonde) sisters and her mom’s (blonde) friend all come in, and they ask to be seated in her section, with her mom immediately starting to joke that we better have good service here.

So, we’re busy and I’m based in a different section, but as that one closes down and I move out there, I’m clearing a few plates from their table and I can see out of the corner of my eye that my coworker is approaching, so I say to the table loudly and theatrically, “Here, let me get this for you, it seems that your waitress isn’t pre-bussing your dirty plates,” and the mom finds that really funny, but my coworker is a little offput.

Then, later later, I’m going around with water to all of the tables, and I’m at their table and she is approaching again, so I do the same thing and rapidly go to fill up any glass I see, and I make a similar comment about them not getting water, and she just looks at me with the glass I’m filling and is like, “[my first name], that’s Starry” (the renamed, Sprite-like Sierra Mist drink).

“Oh,” I was like, and then I began laughing at myself. “I deserve that!”

3) Throughout the night, they’re setting up the entire restaurant to be set up for a wedding the next day – a Sunday, when the restaurant is typically closed – and as I’m running around helping people, I heard the the one (big personality) (redheaded) (Irish-American) owner talking with a customer about what event they’re doing and how they’re setting up, and after she mentions about the open bar, the customer is saying he wonders how much they’ll drink on a Sunday, and she was immediately like, “Yeah, when they said that, I was thought, ‘That’ll kill the liquor bill!’”, and he kind of made a mug and rolled her eyes a bit, too.

4) As the night is ending, the one (straggly-bearded) (thin) (white) (stoner) cook offers me a full Greek salad, since it’s a mistake since he put onions on it and the customer said no onions.

“Thanks!”, I was like, and I took a leftover blue-cheese dressing that someone had poured and dumped it on there, and I clarified to him that I’d eat it here and finish it before the last dishes from customers were put through (i.e., I wouldn’t leave a dirty plate behind in dish), and if I was getting close and couldn’t finish, I’d pack it up to-go then, but don’t throw it out.

And, he was cool with that, and every once in a while I’d run back and wolf down huge bites as the kitchen cleaned up around me.

And, as I was doing that, I took a too-large bite, and as I bit into a yellow cherry tomato my mouth wasn’t quite closed, and this giant spray of yellow cherry tomato juice and seeds that was inside it sprayed out across the counter there where I was eating, which someone had already wiped down.

5) On the bus ride home, two (white) (STEM) undergraduates behind me are talking about how they have a big bottle of vodka and are debating what to do with it for their party.

“We could get an eighty-nine cent Coke from Circle K,” the one was like, floating the idea of getting a gas station fountain drink in a huge styrofoam cup for the mixer.

Another day at my new job…

…at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel:

1) The one (bearded) (bleary-eyed) (goateed) bartender who has said in the past that such-and-such wasn’t good for his mental health gets on me again for using one of two nozzles behind the bar to refill soda water like I was told was okay during training, and he was like, “I thought I told you not to do that!”, very aggressively.

2) A (plump) (perky) (eyeshadowed) (middle-aged) (Latina?) woman is in with her family after she was just there the previous day with a friend, and she’s drinking the same thing and I recommend another drink on the menu and she immediately reminds me that we had briefly talked about this yesterday and she’d like to but she can’t because she’s allergic to pineapple juice, and I say that the one manager who knows the bar program is there and I can ask her about if the drink can be adjusted, so I run out to the one (introverted) (tattooed) (white) manager and ask her what would work, and she said that sub that the customer mentioned would, so I go tell the customer and I also tell her to specify that she has an allergy, and to keep in mind that if the drink just doesn’t work, she should return it and go back to what she knows she likes, that can happen and we checked it out as much as possible and it seems like it would work, but if it doesn’t, it doesn’t, and we do that for people, so she shouldn’t hesitate to send it back if she does end up trying that cocktail mod and doesn’t like it.

Later, then, my one (built) (jacked) (marathon-running) coworker comes out with the bill, and she’s like, “What did you do with this table?!” and she points to a 35% tip.

3) This one (perky) (middle-aged) (round-faced) (Asian-American) customer who I recognize from the one (Thai) restaurant where I used to work at is in with some friends and one of their sons, and she looks at me and asks me where she knows me from, and I tell her, and she’s like, “That’s it!”, and she says that she always gets pad thai woonsen now after I recommended that to her, and I ask her if she gets it spicy because I only eat that spicy because I think it works well with the sugar and the noodle even though I don’t like spicy food, and she says no, she just gets it regular, she never likes spicy food.

One day at my new job…

…at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel:

1) After the previous afternoon when I was walking to the local salon to schedule a hair appoint and suddenly I felt something on my forehead and I smash it and it’s a little clumpy dot of blood and mosquito legs, I’m sitting out on the front porch of the front house doing language study and I see a mosquito there, too.

And, on the phone that same day, my mother says that she just saw the first mosquito there, too, and when I’m surprised because they’re that much farther north than I am, she says that they’re also around more water, don't forget.

2) This (older) (white) couple is in and the (dyed-hair blonde) wife is chatty but also very prickly, like, when she orders a cocktail and I identify that it’s a variant of a common cocktail but smoky because of this one smoky ingredient that's in it, which is something I do because sometimes customers don't pay attention and then order it and taste it and are surprised and unhappy, she’s like, “Yes, I imagine, I thought that when I read [the ingredient name],” and she says that as she picks up the menu and reads the ingredient name back out loud to me.

And, later, when I go to clear appetizer plates, she says that she would like a to-go box, and when I ask her if she wants the sauces too, she says yes, and I ask her if she wants one or both, and she says both, so I bring out the box and the appropriate number of cup-tops (since the sauces already come in little black plastic cups that you can easily take home with you, if someone brings out a lid for you).

And, my one (skinny) (bearded and balding) (pun-loving) coworker mostly dealt with them after that, but at the end of the meal they wave me over, and the lady picks up the last portion of her burger – it’s like smaller than a matchbox – and she says there isn’t any cheese on there, although you can see it’s grilled into the patty, and she also says that the sauce had onions in it and she doesn’t like onions.

“I said no onions when they asked if I wanted onions on my burger,” she was like. “You think someone would have mentioned that the sauce has onions, that that would have been a good idea…”

And, I say sometimes that happens, if there’s strong preferences always ask about sauces, and then she starts talking about the cheese again, and so I go get the (athletic) (Asian-American) (semi-manager) who’s on duty and tell her that the lady is eccentric and what complaints she has, and she goes over there and ends up comping her the burger, and I ask her why and if there’s a policy and she says that other people like the owner and the one (introverted) (tattooed) (white) manager wouldn’t comp her the burger probably because she ate so much of it, but that wouldn’t work with her because she’s too young and the customer wouldn’t take her seriously.

And, later, after I close out that table’s check, I go to clear leftover plates and there on the appetizer plate is one of the lids for the to-go sauces, unused.

“Did you need this top for the to-go sauce?”, I was like, and the lady is like imperiously, “No,” so I’m like, “Well, I asked specifically and you said that you wanted both cups, so I’m just going to leave this here for you,” and I pick up the sauce and the top and place them on the table more towards her, at which she’s like, “Well, you’re right,” and then she starts to shamefacedly put the lid on the cup and then goes to put both of them in her to-go box.

3) At a table of three (white) businesswomen with separate checks for reimbursement and separate alcohol checks on top of that since the company that they work for won’t pay for their alcohol, one lady decides at the end of the meal to take up my recommendation of a dessert cocktail, and then since it has a common dessert name and is like $12, she asks me how it would be itemized on the bill, and I tell her that I can check on that for her, and it comes out not listed as a cocktail and there’s no separate alcohol tax and the items just reads with the common dessert name with no indication whatsoever that it's actually a cocktail, and so she says to put that on her main bill, she’ll submit it and they’ll never know.

4) When I’m busy in the lounges and keep pre-bussing empty plates into a bus-tub cart nearby but not clearing it since I’m doing triage and there’s more important things to do with customers, my one (skinny) (bearded and balding) (pun-loving) coworker sees it stacked high and says that I should take it in and to be careful, if it gets too high or stuff stays there too long and the owner sees it, she’ll get mad, she thinks it looks bad for customers.

Earlier, too, after the eccentric lady complaining about the onions in the sauce, he says that that’s on him, he should have mentioned the onions in the sauce, and I said not really, I had no idea that there were even onions in that sauce, and I’ve eaten of those d*mn burgers.

5) When I bus a few plates back to dish, the one (younger) (blonde) (bespectacled) (art school grad) dishwasher sees some uneaten cod fillets on an uneaten pile of French fries and he points and is like, “Do you mind?”, and when I say no, he just grabs one and starts munching on it in front of me, as he stands there in his dish-apron between cleansing racks of glasses and dishes and whatnot.

6) At a nearby new industrial-area bar after work that’s on my way home, I’m on my second beer and I go to go to the restroom and I put my napkin on my glass, and when I come back there’s this (giantly fat) (kind of ghetto) (Gen Z) black girl on my stool with my drink in front of her, she came in with friends and was meeting some people a few seats over from me at the bar, and I am just befuddled and say “Excuse me” and go to get my drink from in front of her, and she doesn’t even register what’s happening and that she stole my seat, and after I move to a nearby table because I don’t want to start something, I see her get a drink and set up her phone on the counter and stream herself the entire time she’s there.

“The entire world is a soundstage to them” is the comment of my one (art school) colleague who wears (women’s) clothes when I text him about how odd that was and how I’ve noticed very weird behavior from Gen Z people.

New development at my old job…

…at the one (Thai) restaurant that I used to work at:

Two new globe lamps hang over the tables in the front windows, you can see from the street.

. . .

(The two old lamps had like a dried leaf-pattern paper wrapped around them in an upward circle for texture and atmosphere, but on the righthand one when you're looking in the paper had become unrolled in a strip and hung down from the lamp like a spiral, with a piece of tape stuck on there towards the outermost layer, as they presumably had tried to fix it once by taping the outermost layer to the next innermost, but they couldn’t get that to work, probably, and perhaps that taping even pulled more loops down and made the lamp even worse, perhaps.)

. . .

(Working close to where you live is great when you work there, but not so much when you quit and then you have to pass by a lot that place that you used to work.)

Restaurant drama…

..at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel, that I now work at:

A (white) man with a(n odd) voice calls up and wants to speak with the one (big personality) (redheaded) (Irish-American) owner, and she says that she’s busy, and when I say his name, she gives this exasperated groan and becomes tense, and after they talk on the phone, she writes this guy’s name up on a note that says to double- and triple-check all of his orders before sending them out, because she’s tired of buying him food, and then she sticks that note up on the food-line where everyone who grabs and bags food can see it.

And, the next night, I get this table of two (white) people, and the woman is quite (odd) and wants grapefruit juice to drink, and they order and eat and when I go to get them to-go stuff, I bring all of that back and the bill too and then I take care of the bill, and then they ask for two sauce-cup tops (?), and then well after the bill is closed out, the (odd) (non-descript) (middle-aged) (white) man says that he has a discount card waiting for him somewhere and he’d like to use it on the bill, and I say that I can find a manager to talk to him about the card, but unfortunately he’s already paid the bill and he’d need to provide the gift card before payment.

And, between the giftcard and all of that behavior, I realize that it’s HIM.

And, when I go and check and come back and tell him that a manager out front can help him with the gift card, he goes and waits at a very funny place at the bar, like down at the end, but also where his body is out in the little aisle that goes back behind the bar, where he’s causing problems for people entering and exiting it.

Just someone who is not aware of proper social behavior, at all... Just a very, very strange human being.

I’ve heard that there’s a trend on social media telling you how to order from restaurants and cancel and complain about your order in order to get your food for free, so, like I wonder if he’s a fundamentally unwell person who was inspired to do this, by that? Like, he’s inventing complaints, in order to get refunds, and he’s doing this repeatedly in a relatively small town?

A story of a(n Argentinian) woman.

On a recent trip to (Texas), I popped into the hostel breakfast room for free coffee before heading out to get something to eat and then move onto my tourism for the day -- the room was high-ceilinged with wooden butcher block tables, with a gigantic map on the far back wall with push-pins and photos and foreign currency banknotes all tacked up onto it, and around the edges of the room there was shelving and various kitchen contraptions and a stove and a sink, above which sat multiple humorous signs about doing your dishes -- and anyhow there was also like four people in there when I walked in, although the (bearded) (New Zealand) guy soon left, and the rest kept on talking and laughing as I got my coffee and sat there and caffeinated after introducing myself, but otherwise remaining quiet as I nursed the brew in my little metal thermos-top screw-off mug that's actually more the size of a cup for (Turkish) coffee rather than a full-blown coffee mug.

And anyhow, at one point, the one (chunky) (mid-30s) (white) (Texas) woman with (wild eyes) and a big floppy (Janis Joplin-type) hat and a short (earth-tone) top with hanging fabric that aired out her (mid-size) fat folds and who kept talking about how expensive parking was everywhere in the city we were in just stopped and gestured to the two other people there, this (bearded) (ratty-looking) (early 40s) (Mexican-American) guy in (all-black) and a(n open-necked) (collared shirt) with a (vague) accent, and this (talkative) (blonde) (frosted-hair) (late 40s) (Argentinian) woman who was there for World Cup tourism since it was cheaper to stay in a non-venue city near an airport hub and jet into elsewhere for games, and who was wearing a short (bright blue) top with hanging fabric kind of like the (fat) (crazy) (Texas) woman, only it wasn't to air out any fat of hers, but rather to feature her tight body.

 "I'm just going to say it, you two are so cute together, you should be a couple!", the (fat) (crazy) (Texas) woman was like, kind of moving her head back and forth and throwing up a finger like she was telling us it all, as she sat there, wide-eyed and putting it all out there.

"Oh no!", the (Argentinian) woman was like, pleasantly and vivaciously but also a bit surprised. "He has four children! And, I prefer more white. Mexicans are too dark. I like white."

Then, she paused, and was like, "But, Brazilians and Colombians are also hot."

And, it seemed to me that she meant that last part of "also hot" in the sense that Brazilians and Colombians aren't really always all that white, but their sexiness is usually sufficient to compensate for the darkness of their skin.

Like, she really said that, in front of everyone, just as part of normal everyday conversation with relative strangers at a hostel.

Quite oddly, no-one else seemed to notice, and they all just kept the light-and-fun conversation going from there.

But, like WTF, Argentina. That's no bueno! Just batshit crazy racist behavior, and so blithe.

I guess that's how normalized it is there?

It really makes you wonder if the late Pope Francis achieved sanctity in part from having to put with that shit, for just years. 

Some recent-ish customers…

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

1) A group of four (pretty dark-skinned) (late 20s / early 30s) (Africans from Africa), two (straight) couples each, where this one (short) woman has a very chic short dress on and high heels and a small hand-held purse and she also has this enormously large bottom and she wants to know if they can’t sit in the lounge with the windows (they can’t, it’s late and it was already shut down for the night), while the one man who has sunglasses on and a blue denim coat with broad synthetic sheep-wool collars wants to know if we serve steaks (we don’t).

2) Two (late middle-aged) women come in, one (white) and one (African), and when I go to seat them at a two-top, they ask to sit at a larger table for four – “Of course,” I was like, which is my typical response to customer requests like that, and then I also say that it’s nice to have more room in case they stick their elbows out when they eat their burgers -- and then later the one (African) lady wants hot tea, and when I bring out the tea selection, she chooses English breakfast, at which I pipe up theatrically that it’s dinner time, and then I immediately say no problem, and I bend over the teabag and pretend to cross out the wording on the wrapper and write something else and am like, “English DINNER tea,” to her great amusement.

3) A table of four (older) (white) (townie) folks are quite amused when I return with their beverages and ask them if they need anything else right now, like does anyone wants any “nibblers” (appetizers).

4) A major branded petroleum company is having a dinner for undergraduate STEM majors looking to enter that industry or who have done or who are doing internships with them or whatever, and it’s like 12 people, like 3-4 execs and the rest students.

And, my stomach sinks when the exec picking up the bill is (South Asian from South Asia).

$225 bill - $0 tip.

Like, wtf? No corporate expense account?

I only noticed it when I was cleaning up their table after they were gone, too…  We don’t do autograts for tables, no matter the size, though we used to autograt 6 or more at the (Thai) restaurant that I used to work at.

An endearing malapropism of my mother.

When she asks me about what exactly I’m studying so much with the one foreign language that I’m studying a lot for dual citizenship purposes – I honestly have been studying for more than an hour a day during certain stretches these past number of months – I tell her that it’s not really related to anything that anyone would know and that it also doesn’t have borrowings like from Latin, so almost all of the vocabulary is completely unrecognizable and unpredictable, and so I’m just memorizing thousands and thousands and thousands of new words, otherwise you can barely navigate texts or interactions at all, without that fundamental base of knowledge.

“So you’re really starting from Ground Zero, aren’t you?”, she’s like, trying to understand.

Spring habits (2 of 2): Sleeping.

As I’m getting ready to go to bed, there’s alerts on the radio about severe storms sweeping through the area, and it seems that they will be doing so all night.

So, when I go to bed, I don’t turn on my humming noise machine that I always have on.

Instead, the rain falling on my roof suffices for white noise to help me sleep, but also without that noise machine, I’ll be able to hear any tornado sirens all that much more easily.

Spring habits (1 of 2): Cleaning.

When the temperature first sharply gets warm, the concrete pad on which my cottage rests is still cold, and that difference in temperatures causes huge condensation on the white ceramic tile that is my floor throughout the entirety of my house, and you can see little pools of water by the corner of your bedroom at night, and behind the furniture you can see like how the settled dust there is now almost like a mild little muck, from how it united with the standing water.

So, as part of spring cleaning, I pull back all of the rugs and furniture, and mop everything up with rags wet with water and Dawn dish soap, to clean out the muck and any mold or whatever that might have started to grow there.

. . .

(“I hate that,” my one [younger] [plumpish] [hair streak-dyed] [mid-Southern] coworker is like, when I tell her about the sludge-formation at my apartment, and it turns out that she’s had places where that has happened, too.)

Daylight savings time.

At work at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel that I work at now, I’m passing through “the server alley” and overhear some coworkers chit-chatting as they stand by the ice machine, and they’re talking about adjusting to time switches and how hard it is on their bodies and how much they hate it.

The next day, then, I wake up and it seems super late from the time on my smartphone, and suddenly I realize that daylight savings time had happened overnight, only I wasn’t aware it was happening at all until that moment, and then I realize that the fact of it happening that night must have sparked my coworkers’ conversation on the previous day.

Addendum.

Sometimes, I feel so trashy.

“He has children in the room from fucking his wife’s pussy, and here he is turning around and looking at some random waiter guy?”.

But, that’s really what was going on there, and if you didn’t notice it, you have part of your brain left out, and if you don’t want to talk about it, you’re simply avoiding reality.

Sometimes life really is just genuinely trashy like that, for those who have eyes to see.

Like, he humped his wife and inseminated her and her pussy and her womb and that kid who came out of it are all just there in that room with him, but he’s thinking about some rando dick.

Like, that’s really the essence of that situation, to the point where no other description even seems possible.

Just so trashy.

A late winter day at work…

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

1) A gigantic group of people from a neighboring state is in the large-group dining room, and it’s a bunch of families with kids because a of huge all-weekend soccer tournament thing going on, like forty or fifty people or so all together.

And, as I go around the tables to refill waters and ask people if they want top-offs on sodas, it suddenly becomes apparent to me that a large number of them are (Bosnian), and at one round table full of dads, like a men’s table where the men have gathered and are drinking and talking apart from the kids’ table and this other mixed wives-and-kids table where one (skinny) (blonde) (middle school-age) (boy) is so tired that he’s actually resting his head on the table as if to go to sleep right there in the restaurant, anyhow, over at the men's table, this one (taller) (late 40s) (bearded) (slightly potbellied) (Bosnian) dad guy like visibly lights up whenever I come near the table, always staring directly at me and my eyes as if to try to catch them, and I also see him turning his head to look at me in the main dining room as everyone from their huge party is leaving in spurts and drabs, processing out from their back dining room to the main door of the restaurant.

And you can just feel it, like, (Bosnian) (dad)-guy wanted me, that much.

And, of course, my first thought was, “Still got it.”

Then, my second thought was that he was checking me out not only when he was there with his man-friends at their man-table, but when his wife and one or more of his young children were physically present in the room, too, he was that into me.

You could just feel the hunger radiating off of him… Just an unbelievably filthy dirty and intense experience, like, he had children in that room from fucking his wife’s pussy, and now he’s turning around and looking at some random waiter guy?

I wonder if he thought of me later, when he masturbated… I really do think that I clicked for him on that level, who knows, maybe my pheromones turned him on or something, I was only a few people away from him at his table, that can happen sometimes in those cases, where someone sparks immediate attraction in someone else like that.

That guy was just that hungry, that (Bosnian) (dad)-guy.

2) After I clock out, I say something to a coworker, and my one (make-upped) (Eastern European last-named) (master’s student) coworker, who always seems to be examining me because I don’t fit in in some way, though she doesn’t quite know how, anyways, she immediately and in a somewhat patronizing tone of voice is like, “Weird,” and then she’s like, “[My first name], did I just hear you swear?!”.

(I have folksy G-rated language that I use a lot with customers, and sometimes that carries over into my interactions with coworkers.)

And, I pause a bit at first because the interaction was offputting, then I’m like, “Me, swear? F*ck no!”

3) When coworkers are off work because everyone got cut early and a few are down at the other end of the bar having (half-price) cocktails and chatting, I too get a (half-price) cocktail, and they invite me down, but I politely decline in order to go sit by myself at the other end of the bar because I need to do my daily vocabulary flashcard study for the one language that I’m learning for dual citizenship purposes, and I say that I have to do it then, because I didn’t have a chance to do it before work, and if I don’t do it then I’ll get home and I'll be lazy and I won’t do it at all.

4) I chit-chat with the one (young) (taller) (macho) (Guatemalan) cook, and he tells me that he just speaks (Spanish), he doesn’t speak any “dialect.”

5) As he comes out through the main dining room to leave for the night and pick up his (half-price) cocktail in a Pepsi to-go cup, the one (straggly-bearded) (thin) (white) (stoner) cook has an incredibly nice green jacket on, and I compliment him on it, and he then starts showing me all the details of its fine workmanship and even its label, and it turns out to be some (Italian designer) jacket that someone had left in the coatroom at the last location of the restaurant and it was there for months and month and months, and so finally he just grabbed it, because it was clear that whoever’s it was, they weren’t coming back for it.

“It fits you like a glove,” I was like. “Nice find.”

A warm-weather spring day at work:

1) Somehow the bus flies through campus and I get to work like 20 minutes early, so I go to sit on the bench outside across the street from the employee entrance, where a thick health insurance company plan booklet sits splayed out, and I move it over as I plop down my workbag and pull out a magazine to do crosswords.

And, I’m doing that for only a few minutes, when this (thin) (early 50s) (wild-eyed) (black) man in dark pants and a heavier leather jacket comes to sit down next to me, right beside my big bag of stuff.

So, I gather it up to move on.

“Hey man,” he was like in a surprisngly normal voice. “I was just here first, but you can sit here too.”

“Thanks but I need some quiet time,” I was like, and I moved away, circling the building to look for a good bench that was out of the sun… 

And, as I came out around on the other side of the building and went to cross the street, too, I see him getting up from the bench and heading across the street to pace a bit between some cars, before heading back towards the bench to linger there again.

2) When I’m making sure to adjust dessert stock so the numbers on our pads reflect actual availability, the one (short) (perky) (daytime) manager walks by and we talk about that, and there’s a few things I don’t quite understand about dessert availability and presentation, so she offers to show me, including getting some out from a back fridge and plating them, which she does with me step-by-step so I can learn.

And, while doing that, she gets called away for setting up for a large university event, and my one (skinny) (bearded and balding) (pun-loving) coworker asks me what I’m doing and I tell him, and I mention how I don’t quite know why she’s doing that now if she has all the event prep stuff to attend to, and he’s like, “Yeah, she’s actually really stressed out about that now, but that’s just how nice she is.”

He then offers to take me downstairs to some storeroom that I didn’t know about, which we then do together.

“...and the tarts are there,” he’s like, at one point, gesturing inside the freezer.

“Like pies or women?”, I’m like.

3) Somehow the large-group dining room has a reservation of like 40 for a university event, only somehow it’s not on a department tab, but rather a bunch of individual bills, and then I hear my one (skinny) (bearded and balding) (pun-loving) coworker tell the one (quiet) (introverted) (tatted) (white) manager that not only is the check situation that way, “But we need separate bills for separate bills,” because all the individual people also want to pay for their alcohol separately.

(Because they’re getting reimbursed for food, and not for liquor?)

“Fucking A,” the one (quiet) (introverted) (tatted) (white) manager is like.

4) As I cut through a small darkened lounge area to get to the area with windows to help a new table there, the one (quiet) (introverted) (tatted) (white) manager is lingering in that empty lounge looking at her phone, and I startle her and she’s like, “Hi, [my name]!”, and that visibly startles me, and then, nicely, she's like, “I was just saying hello!”.

Then, because her top and pants match the color scheme of the walls and chairs, I say that she fits in like a chameleon and I didn’t see her, and she surprised me.

5) As I’m walking out of the area with windows where the new table is sitting – it's two (older) (white) couples catching up, one woman of which I help navigate the menu to find rieslings and moscatos and the one older man of which wears a navy hat and orders a summery berry cocktail that I had highlighted on the menu – I hear the one wife say to everyone, “He is so nice.”

6) At the end of the night, the one (tatted) (white) (teetotalling) cook pulls out a tray of cupcakes and pasta salad from the weekend that wasn’t used for some event and leaves it out on the kitchen island for everyone, and everyone attacks the cupcakes – “Carrot cake?!”, says my one (make-upped) (Eastern European last-named) (master’s student) coworker – but no-one seems to be caring about the pasta salad.

“If no-one wants this, I’ll grab it,” I was like, at which point the one (younger) (blonde) (bespectacled) (art school grad) dishwasher was like, “Hey, I’ll get some too, if you want to split it,” and I talk with him, and he says something about how he doesn’t have enough money for groceries this week, so I offer it all to him and say that if he wants it all, take it all, I just didn’t want it to go to waste, but he says he doesn’t want to take it from me, so I say that I’ll just have a bit of it, and he can have the rest, and so I go and grab an appetizer plate and a fork from “the server alley” and scoop a bit of pasta onto that and eat it, and then I dump the rest into a to-go box that I had brought back there for him, since he was right in the middle of doing dishes when the pasta salad became available.

He also mentions my standing invitation to different people to go to this new bar that opened up, and he says maybe this weekend, because that night he’s going over to another bar, to have some drinks and flirt with the bartender there.

Shopping with allergies.

For the yearly sale on bulk items at the local co-op – like the beans and the rice and the dried fruit and whatnot that's in these large rows of plastic bins with flip-tops and scoops attached to them, as well as jars of spices across the aisle that you screw the lids off of and scoop out with smaller heavy metal spoons that rest in “CLEAN” and “DIRTY” plastic industrial dishwasher-like containers sunk into the counter there – anyhow, for that yearly sale on bulk items at the local co-op, I laid out empty yogurt containers on my counter as a reminder for myself the previous day, to gather them up and go in the next day and use them for the sale.

(You get extra money off your bill if you bring in your own containers.)

So, I did that, and although I had stored all of my yogurt containers tucked into one another with the lids piled in a neat stack on top, I discover at the store that somehow I’m two lids short.

(When I get home, I discover them slid off to the side by some other tupperware in the tupperware cabinet above my stove-and-sink area, in the little cottage that I live in.)

When I unpack at home, too, I also discover that I forgot to buy a couple containers of (free-range) eggs that I had been meaning to pick up at the co-op when I was there for the bulk sale, too…

Ah, shopping with allergies… You really have more cognitive impairment than you realize, and it’s only after mistakes become apparent that you realize that you're like that.

Another day at work…

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

1) A (South Asian from South Asia) table of five (twenty-somethings) comes in, and as often occurs, they hop all over the place with their order, and one (curly and messy-haired) (lighter-skinned) (bespectacled) (girl) gives this order with her hamburger toppings – she’s substituting a black bean patty, and then has a number of other specifications, like most customers do – and then after I key this all in on the keypad, she’s like, “Oh yes, and I want some cheese,” which is a b*tch, since you can’t add cheese at that point without majorly upping the price, you’d have to originally key in the order as a cheeseburger in order to get a fair price for the customer, so I tell her that in so many (nice) words for next time, and I then delete that item and I have to enter everything in again, partially from memory and partially from re-inquiring with her about toppings.

And, one guy wants a milkshake, which is time-intensive and we have to make ourselves, and my coworker gives me guidance in conjunction with the posted instructions that are tacked onto the dessert cooler back in “the server alley,” but I make the 3 scoops of ice cream too large, and though there’s usually some left over for you to pour into a separate glass and sip, this time there was enough to make an entirely separate second milkshake, so I get to have that, which is kind of nice, just that once.

The bill is $72, paid by the (imperious) (darker-skinned) (male) shake-drinker, with $0 tip.

2) In that same area by the blender and milkshake instructions and dessert cooler in “the server alley,” there’s two tall quart containers filler with mixed nuts and cinnamon-and-sugar dusted cashews, left over from a recent wine tasting event in the reception room where our kitchen assembled the charcuterie boards and the event staff brought in the wines for the wine tasting.

At first I grab them directly with my hand, but then I realize that’s gross, and so I take two soup spoons and put one in each container, and I use the spoon to lift the nuts up and dump them into my hand, from which point I then raise them to my mouth to eat them.

After I’m done eating, too, I just leave the soup spoons in the containers, for anyone who wants some nuts in the future.

The madness of the first warm day of the year.

It is always very interesting how people just go crazy when the first warm day of the year arrives.

That day also happened to be a day when I began work at 4pm rather than 5pm as I had been for a while, and I didn’t realize that all day until I got my standard work-app phone notice at 3pm that I began work in an hour and I saw it and I was like WTF and I had to run around and get ready in a rush so I could be out the door in time to catch the bus in, which was unusually packed and warm and stuffy and the people were so weird and talking loud on the phone and stuff, including one (middle-aged) (black) guy who turned out not to be talking on the phone at all, but rather talking to himself.

Then, when I sat outside on a park bench to kill ten minutes before I walk in and start work, and also when I’m working a bit later and am by the doors, you can just hear cars revving and speeding up and down the street, like they’re revving so loudly and speeding so much that the sound actually travels into the restaurant.

Like, people seriously lose it when the first warm weather hits, and it’s like, just get me home and out of this, since when people get like that, you just don’t know what the f*ck is going to happen, and you don’t want to be in the middle of it or out and exposed when some asshole runs his car through an intersection or turns around a corner at too high a speed and loses control of it and it goes onto the sidewalk or something like that.

Just better to be inside; once people get it out of their system, the other, later warm days will be calmer, better to wait for that to be out and enjoy the weather.

A valid reflection that I saw on social media:

It's America 250 and also the World Cup, but the current occupant of the Oval Office so affects the national mood, that it's like these things that should be so big and so joyous just aren't registering at all with people at large.

It's like he just sucked the joy out of these pretty big national events, that's how bad he is.

Foreign language study for dual citizenship purposes.

The notoriously hard language that I’m intensively studying for dual citizenship purposes is such a little bitch.

There’s so few cognates that even most news articles are impossible to read. If you know a language with cognates, you can fill in the gaps if you don’t know one word or maybe two, but what happens if you don’t know four or five?

Like, that's the situation that I've been facing. 

So, basically I’m using an online flashcard app to memorize simply thousands of vocabulary words, and I can already see how much more I can understand when I come across a previously largely unintelligible sentence that I had read months ago, but still, it’s tremendously discouraging when you get a new text and you realize that you don’t even know a fairly standard, important word like “estimate” or “improvement” and you can’t even identify a part of speech because so many of the endings look alike and because so many of the words at play are unknown.

My father’s one cousin writes once or twice a year around Christmas or Easter to give “greetings from the whole family,” and I usually used to write her back a few short very ungrammatical lines in reply, but with this latest round of contact around Easter, I really rolled out the language study and I told her that I was studying it again.

She immediately replied back with a longer email, and it was good to have so much text from a native speaker in an authentic communicative situation.

(Unlike her kids, I think she never really studied [English] as her foreign language, she did something else like [German], I believe.)

She wanted to see family pictures, too, so I had to gather some together, and then it took me several weeks to write back, and this email of like 7-8 short paragraphs explaining the pictures and giving news took TWO HOURS to write and edit, including making sure that I had all of the right little accent marks over everything, since the keyboard on my laptop isn't set up for that.

Like, wtf.

I did tell her when I apologized for the delay, though, that I was not only gathering family pictures, but the language is hard, so for me this isn’t an easy, friendly email, but rather homework.

And, I inserted a “laughing with pinched eyes” emoji.

I do hope the humor came through with that.

Spring allergies.

My spring allergies are always horrendous now, in the college town that I now live in…

Once you get outside of the town, it’s pretty rural, and everything in town has nice vegetation that’s almost southern and pretty much comes into bloom all at once.

I juice up every year with a nasal spray so the steroids have taken effect by the time that stuff really gets going, but even then I have problems, especially with post-nasal drip that makes me cough, which is a big problem at work when I’m waiting tables... If a cough suddenly comes upon me, I have to make sure to cough into my elbow, and I also have to make sure to tell customers that I’m not sick, there’s no way that I would come into work if I was sick, I just have bad seasonal allergies that are hard to medicate for, I tell them.

(There’s nothing grosser in a restaurant than an obviously sick employee.)

This year, too, my post-nasal drip developed into a small sinus infection, and for like 3 nights in a row my coughing woke me up at like 4/5/6am in the morning, where I’d have this heavy cough that wouldn’t stop until I finally got up out of bed and went into the bathroom and bent over the sink there and the change in position and sharp snorting would cause this simply gigantic dark hunk of congealed phlegm to tip over from my nasal cavity into the back of my throat, often catching there at the edge and causing me to choke, though, until finally I could snort sharply enough to get it into my mouth and spit it out into this hunk that just hit the bottom of the sink and sat there as like this big brown thing surrounded by a small pool of clear saliva, it was always so weighty, and massive.

Finally I got another strategy, too, where I would put a cough drop in my mouth when I laid down in bed to go to sleep, and I just let it rest in the side of my cheek…  Basically it would slowly dissolve all night long and keep my salivary glands going, and that would help enough with the post-nasal drip to mask it or to wash it away or whatever it does to help me so that I don’t wake up at night.

What a mess, and your personal state of unwellness simply does not match the vibe of the springtime.

New job personalities…

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

1) A (blonde) (make-upped) (college-age) coworker introduces me to this one (younger) (white) customer who’s a friend of theirs who’s visiting from out-of-town from a town to the south of us, and that friend comments that she’s in the service industry, too, although she works at “a hillbilly country club.”

“You guys should serve moonshine cocktails,” I was like.

“Actually, we do,” she was like.

She also said that she sells a shit-ton of pickleback shots, since she tells everyone that it will help them with their golf-swing.

2) In the early part of the shift before any rush and people are chatting, someone asks me how I’m doing, and I say great because I just filed my taxes, and at that my one (skinny) (bearded and balding) (pun-loving) coworker says that it’s a great feeling to have that off your chest, he just filed multiple years of back taxes since he hadn’t paid his taxes for like five years, and when I raise an eyebrow at that, he vaguely says something about a medical condition and insurance and treatments, although he doesn’t say anything about not being able to manage paperwork, and he's just all very mysterious about it, even though he's the one who mentioned everything first.

Tidbits from my new job…

…at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel:

1) Because we serve ranch dressing with several appetizers, customers comment now and then about how good the ranch dressing is, and I find myself often telling them about how former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos had this like food fountain back at a family wedding in Michigan, only instead of serving like melted chocolate that you could elegantly dip strawberries into, it was filled with ranch dressing.

And, people think that’s awesome, by and large.

2) The POS tablets that we have to carry around are super-weighty and I would find them pulling down my apron halfway through the shift, often at inconvenient times, and I just couldn’t find a way to tie it right now matter how hard I tried, that is until my one (skinny) (bearded and balding) (pun-loving) coworker told me his tip he figured out, just loop it through the back loops on your pants before tying, that makes it more secure, that’s what worked for him before he got these like stretchy black hiking pants for his workpants that have these ginormous side pockets that can actually expand to fit the whole tablet, he said.

3) It's tough when customers order a hamburger and then say at some point later that they want cheese on it, since your first major choice on the menu is to classify something as a hamburger or a cheeseburger, and once they start off as a hamburger but then go the cheese route, you have to go back and delete everything you did and start it anew as a cheeseburger, since if you keep it as a hamburger and add cheese it’s a different, higher price, which is no good.

4) Quite surprisingly, the fried cauliflower has like a buffalo wing flavor somehow mixed into the breading, and so I find myself making sure to ask customers if they’ve had that dish before when they order, and if they haven’t, I let them know that in advance, so there’s no surprises. 

A good deal of the time, too, people end up changing their appetizer order, once they find that out.

5) Sometimes when (white) ladies who drink wine order cabernet sauvignon, I take it to the table and am like, “Who called a cab?”

Two recent cottage problems:

1) The sink in the bathroom backs up, and though I run my finger around the upper inside of the drain to dislodge any gunk, that makes it even worse, where no water will drain through it, even after sitting overnight.

(In the morning I find an old bread-knife that I never use in one of my lesser-used drawers in the kitchen, so I stick it down the drain and twirl it and voila, unclogged.)

(I then put Dawn dish soap all over that mother-effing bread knife, all up and down its blade, and just kind of leave it out in my sink.)

. . . 

2) A cluster of ants have swarmed on something that fell under my kitchen table -- a dropped piece of food? - and gradually I realize that there's ants here and there all around them, and extending all the way to the front door of my little cottage.

(I spray rubbing alcohol over all of them that I see, and I then get a rag and dump a ton of Dawn dish soap over it and wet it and rub everything down, going from the food to the front door.)

(I have to rinse out the rag multiple times since there's so many ant carcasses caught up in it, to the point that I even consider throwing it out, though I don't, I rinse it again and leave it to be laundered.) 

Tree-death.

With that one parasitic tree-of-heaven that was removed from outside my cottage a few years ago, I had been diligently picking up new shoots from its leftover root system, and this year it's clear that they're gone in like half the yard, since presumably the subterranean roots there finally totally died out over the winter.

The stump is also decomposing, now, and mushrooms appear on it in the rain. 

POS.

At the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel where I work now, the POS (point-of-service) system on the tablets that we carry around with us is a real POS (piece of shit).

You have no idea how hard it is to move items from one check to another if they’re put on the wrong table or put on the wrong check when there’s a split check at the table… 

Once when a lady was unhappy with her cocktail and we went to delete it, I handed my tablet to a manager for her to punch in her code and take it off the bill, only, one of the beers further down off-screen must have been previously tapped and accidentally highlighted, too, so that also disappeared, and it was only because the customer noticed it at the end of the meal when they were looking at the receipt that we were able to go back and add it back onto the bill where it belonged.

It really makes you wonder what’s going on with software design, where a product isn’t easily usable on such a basic level with such a basic everyday task in the workplace.

An evening at the local music bar:

1) When I went to buy a pack of peanuts – they have those for sale for like fifty cents or a dollar, and I tend to get them when I’m drinking, since not only are they tasty, but they’re a heck of a lot more healthy than like Doritos or Cheetos or whatnot – I ask the (unaffable) (fish-faced) (early 50s) (white) bartender for “a well whiskey on the rocks, no straw, and a peanut,” and he’s like, “Just one?”.

2) Later, the one (large) (bearded) (sound engineer) who I know from around town is over by me, and I ask him to watch my study-stuff while I run to the restroom, and he does, and then later he asks me to watch his drink while he does the same.

“This would be the perfect time to roofie it,” I was like. “We’ve built up trust through the first exchange, and now I take advantage of it, for my own ends.”

And, he laughed, and then was like, “Just like I planned it.”

3) Some (older) (white) guys are also there at the bar – they’re in town from different states since they grew up in the area, and their dad is like in his 90s and needs help right now and their sibling who lives locally can’t handle everything – and when it gets late and a cloudburst happens and I mention to them that I want to go home but the rain is too heavy, the one gestures to this raincoat hanging from a hook underneath the bar between us that had led us initially to start talking since I had asked them if it was theirs or if someone was sitting there, and he’s like, “[My first name], take the raincoat and return it tomorrow.”

A childhood memory…

…of my one (eccentric) (blonde) (semi-manger) coworker at the (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel, where I work now:

Growing up back at her parents’ restaurant, she discovered that the bar nozzle for sodas had a short lag-time when the pop syrup was coming out but before the carbonated water kicked in, and so she’d tap the button repeatedly whenever she wanted a soda, and it was her just like drinking pure sugar water at eight years old without her parents having any idea that was going on, and she did that shit like all the time.

. . .

(. . .)

Two bits of customer banter at my new job…

…at the (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel:

1) When I go to seat three (older) (gruff) (white) farmers at a table and the little cocktail lamp there is shut off because it’s either broken or its power has run out, I pick it up and I say that I’ll go get a new one, and without even looking at me or pausing from pulling out his chair, the one is like, “That’s fine, we don’t need no ambiance.”

2) When I deliver this one specialty burger with a chili sauce on top of it, I wish the (older) (white) lady who is talking intensely about home health care with her friend an enjoyable meal, and I remark how good the burger looks and I say how I’ve been meaning to try that specific burger because it always looks so good when I bring it out to tables, and she just looks at me and is like, “Not tonight, bud.”

Some recent phone oddities with my parents.

1) For a while, my mother would not say hello when she picked up the phone but instead waited for you to say hello first, since that was her method of trying to identify spam calls.

2) One time, my dad answers and then just hangs up when I’m done talking to him without passing the phone along to my mother, and when I call back and ask him to speak to her, he says that she’s in town.

An odd sight this year at the end of winter:

As I go around my yard and the front house to pick up stray trash, just beyond my kitchen window the ground is covered here and there in blue feathers, some covered by dead leaves, but none with bits of flesh attached to them like a bird that had been killed and eaten or something like that.

Bar tacos.

One Saturday after work after a big basketball game that the local university team ended up losing in a really disappointing way, I ended up heading across the street to this (old) (townie) dive bar, and a big group of people way down at the other end of the bar had this big aluminum catering tray of stuff out and so I assumed that they had brought in food for some party like maybe for a party around the game, and then when I was on my second beer, the (older) (short-haired) (dyed blonde) (fatter) (back-tatted) (female) bartender brings it down to our end of the bar and dumps it there and says that there’s tacos for anyone who wants them.

And, I grab one and unwrap it from the tin foil and it’s amazing, and so I ask her when she’s back over by me who brought it in and she says a regular, and later when a (young) (white) guy in (team) gear by the bar grabs a taco after I point them out to him and he asks who brought them in, I tell him that, and he just nods solemnly and is like, “They’re the real hero tonight.”

Later, too, since I’m still unclear on the situation, I ask that same bartender again when she’s back over by me if that regular works at a taqueria or has money to burn or what, and at that she just laughs and is like, “Both!”, and then she says that the regular is the owner of a regional taco chain that she names by name, he comes in here a lot and he does that every so often for people, he just brings in a huge thing of tacos for all the people who are hanging out drinking so they can have a good time.

. . .

(I end up eating two there and take one to go when no-one else is eating them, and then like at 3am or 4am that night I wake up with this just horrendous heartburn from the spicy red sauce that all the bits of steak were covered in, though luckily I have some Tums that were left me by the one [worked out] [STEM] [Brazilian] when he moved, and so I chew a few of those and am able to go back to sleep again right away, no problem.)

College application lingo.

The other week when I was texting a (Welsh-American) friend from college and the subject of his son's college applications came up, he mentioned that it seemed to them that Duke was "a high reach," to which I replied -

Not the change the subject, but "high reach" sounds like you're trying to jack someone off who's like 6'5"

- to which he replied -

It does seem a bit like that in practice.

. . .

(. . .) 

Bathroom sink sight...

...as I brush my teeth after breakfast, and prop up my smartphone on the against-the-wall high-and-tight elevated sink-ledge in order to watch some video as I brush:

Something falls out from behind the phone and lands in a small pool of water to the left of the faucet on the counter-top surrounding the basin where water tends to pool for some reason, probably because the counter-top has a backward slant that doesn't allow water to drain more easily into the basin, but instead directs it away from it, and anyhow there on the sink there is a very small light yellow centipede like the size of a fingernail clipping, only thinner, or at least there is one there until I cup my hands and put water in them and throw it on the bug in order to flush it down the sink into the drain, there.

Another line I've used at my new job...

 …at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel, whenever I start expounding on how the house cocktails are not only well-mixed, but also very reasonably priced:

"And remember, the more you drink, the more you save."

A line I’ve used at my new job…

…at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel, whenever someone who seems chill enough orders a “Mick ultra” (Michelob Ultra):

Me: “Ahhh, a Mick ultra… The favorite drink of my friend’s ex-wife.”

. . .

(True story. They also usually don’t know what to say and I usually say this to the [macho] [white] guys who drink that shit, although once someone was like “Well, that’s something” and then said no more, which I guess is a lot like not saying anything at all in response, I guess.)

A mild joke at my new job…

…at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel, when the managers are finally cutting me for the night but also seem unsure about whether to do so, yet:

Me (in game show voice): “Is that your final answer?”

Addendum.

I've come across work by people who have major institutional positions, like curatorships and stuff, and it's like, ERP.

And, these are major well-known places, too!

It's like a colleague who works on a different language family and who's given me good advice has observed to me when I relate stuff to him about the field, "What is this backwater?". 

Supposedly anonymous peer reviews.

In the past half year, I got back some supposedly anonymous peer reviews for an article where a peer reviewer in the first round had tried to sabotage the project (probably because I'm obviously right, and they'd tried to put their hand to the notorious field-problem before, to no avail).

And, these new peer reviews you could work with, but they were still shocking. You could totally tell who wrote them, and although I’d previously categorized these people as better people in the field, there was still some pretty glaring eccentricities in thinking, as well as the use of widespread but poorly-grounded operative categories that they simply weren’t questioning, but instead rotely repeating as obvious touchpoints.

And, these are the good ones.

Like, what the f*ck is up with this field that I’ve been dabbling in, with the one ancient language that I’ve made myself into quite the expert in over the past number of years?

Honestly.

The quality of scholarship is just very bad, although I often charitably call it “uneven.”

I really don’t understand what these people do all day, since they certainly don’t seem to be solving major unresolved issues in scholarship.

Professional oddity.

After my one popular lecture a few years ago, people have been asking me to do another one, but the biggest stumbling block has been access to a portable projector for a PowerPoint.

I can understand why university tech resources wouldn’t want to loan them out to just anyone, but it’s just an odd position to be in, where I can access the libraries and maintain a larger practice with conference presentations and journal publications and whatnot, and yet I don’t have access to that basic tech.

It’s really like a dividing line putting me on the outside of the profession, separating the haves from the have-nots.

One of those days, a few months ago.

I wake up and am waiting for my coffee to brew, and then I realize that I forgot to turn it on.

And then, when I do turn it on, it’s the wrong burner and it starts singeing a pan that I had sitting out on top of it, which I only notice when the burning gets so bad that you can start smelling it.

It’s a rainier, greyer day, too, and I can’t read the footnote of an article that I had printed out in 4-on-1 format to save paper and make it so I save space in my hard files of marked-up articles, so I have to bring it to the window to look at it there, or use the bright light on my smartphone to illuminate it.

At the local brewery that night, the one (white) (young) (female) bartender with (pussy hat) energy is coughing up a storm and wiping her nose with the back of her hand, repeatedly, and it’s totally Typhoid Mary vibes.

. . .

(“Maybe she needed the money and couldn’t afford not to come into work,” my mom says later.)

A customer interaction at my new job…

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

When a (well-dressed) (vaguely foreign) (round-faced) (older) (white) lady who's (mildly chunky) and who had been getting wine and cocktails with two (educated) (white American) types goes to pay, she hands me the bill and cash, and is like, “That should take care of it,” to which I’m like, “The only problem is if there’s too little.”

And, at that, “Ha!”, she’s like, “Yes!”.

A strange nighttime event.

I’m shutting off lights in the kitchen and preparing to go enter my bedroom to read before bed, when suddenly my mild headache becomes a quick sharp pain in my right front lobe, just there and gone in a flash.

And, it really freaks me out, although there’s no effects on anything else like impaired motion or whatnot like I assume would happen from a burst blood vessel or a mild stroke or that kind of thing, so I just chalk it up as a manifestation of the mild headache that I was having, although I do consider writing a farewell note or something saying what happened to leave on my kitchen table, in case I don’t wake up, which in retrospect is odd since if I was feeling like that was a true possibility, I probably should have gone to the emergency room to figure out what happened and gotten it checked out.

A feat of envrionmental neuroticism:

After late spring ants start coming into my cupboard and crawling all over the (folded over and binder-clipped down) bag of brown sugar there, I pull out this damaged Glad plasticware bowl where I had accidentally put a knife through the side in a big slash since I had used it to freeze some broth and then was cutting portions off from the frozen ice-chunk inside that plastic bowl there and the knife slipped, only, now I just slapped duct tape over that part of the bowl, and I could use it to seal the sugar inside and keep it ant-proof, since the ants couldn't smell it anymore once it was inside the repaired container.

An advantage of my new job:

I can walk or bus to this one grocery store near campus, and then walk and catch another bus route home, and that store usually has *great* sales on Greek yogurt, not to mention avocados.

For me, Greek yogurt is like the perfect treat, especially when it’s non-fat, since it’s all savory and protein-rich and relatively low calorie – 1 gram of protein per every 10 calories is a good ratio, I’ve heard – and plus you can dress it up with like oats and brown sugar and stuff if you want to, as some sort of dessert/sweet thing that’s not too horrendously bad for you.

The only downside is all if the plastic containers that are left over afterwards, even if you buy it in bulk and not in the little individually-packaged thingies… Just so wasteful.

I wish they had some sort of more environmentally-friendly bulk yogurt containers that wasn’t plastic, to tell you the truth…  Right now I’m just washing them out and saving them in my cupboard so I can use them to store bulk beans and grains and whatnot when I buy that kind of thing down at the local co-op, although there’s only so much of that that you can do, to re-use containers.

A (Brazilian) surprise.

As I’m in bed sleeping until late like I always do because of my later work schedule, I hear my phone ringing with some calls like twice in 2 minutes, and when I get up later, I see that it’s WhatsApp calls from the one (worked out) (STEM) (Brazilian), who I had sent a message to there a day or 2 earlier to see how he was settling back down after his return home.

He was calling me to do Facetime-type stuff like I’ve seen (Brazilians) do incessantly with each other, like I was one of them!

It’s funny, because once when I was hanging out with him and the one (young) (heavyset) (blonde) artist who lives in the college town that I now live in, he got a call like that, and it was the (short) (elderly) (always elegantly-dressed) mother of the (vivacious) and (warm) (Brazilian) wife of the (older) couple who’ve lived around town for years…  She had talked with him a lot at their parties, and she was online and saw that he was on, and so she called him up to see how he was doing, even though she’s like decades and decades older than him!

It’s really funny how (Brazilians) use social media and technology so differently from us…  Just a lot of different norms and ways that they use things, like the way that they are always present with each other socially through them.

New routines at my new job..

…at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel:

1) Whenever no-one’s around and I'm dumping drinks into the bar’s sink, I not only set dirty glasses up in the rack there next to the small dishwasher for glassware like we’re supposed to do, but I reach into the sink and collect any straws garnishes etc. to throw out, and I also palm any unsqueezed lemons or limes, then after throwing the other stuff out, I furtively slip them into my back pocket as I walk away, so I can take them home and use the juice for that haircare highlighting thing that I've been doing for years now, where I squeeze the citrus into my hand and rub it in my hair before going outside into the sun.

If no-one's around or looking, I kind of do the same in the dishroom off the kitchen when I return plates with fish sandwiches or the cod platter and people didn’t use their giant lemon wedges.

2) When I get cut at the end of the night but a big basketball game is on TV for the local university, I stay around 4 or 5 minutes to watch, as do like 3-4 other staff people who are on or off shift, in the closing later-night restaurant with a handful of tables still in it.

Dissertation committees.

A bit ago on social media I saw a post from one scholar who I follow there about being on a dissertation committee, and then a few months later I saw another post like that from him again.

And, it made me just so glad that I don’t have to do that.

What a huge time commitment, and besides you have to be involved in recommendation letters, the advisee’s drama around the complete and utter collapse of traditional worthwhile careers paths, etc.

Just better not to be involved.

Events of a day…

…when I go to stay with the one (elderly) aunt of the one (lesbian) sister of my one (former) (assisted living client) with (disabilities), since the aunt had had surgery and needed someone there with her during the day every day for like 2-4 weeks afterwards, and her (lesbian) niece was getting burned out from doing that for so long:

2) My to-do list in the mudroom foyer off the garage include an item “SHRED” since she needed some paper-shredding done, and so I took a pen and drew a “rock on!” hand next to it alongside the words, “Yeah, man!”

2) Two (Latina) cleaning ladies come over and it turns out that one is from (Venezuela) and the other is from (Mexico), and when I remark in (Spanish) that I’m surprised that they’re not (Guatemalan), the latter says something about how there’s already bastantes (“enough”) around here.

3) When the aunt hobbles over to the fridge to get some cream for her coffee and then comes back and starts pouring it out, it like pours out in these great chunks, and I worry that the milk is spoiled until I look closer and I see that it’s a box of whipping cream, since she uses whipping cream in her coffee.

4) Twice I take her dog out to exercise and I keep playing fetch with her where I throw the balls far down the yard for her for her to pick up and bring back, and I do that until she gets so tired that she starts walking back instead of running. And, like at that point she’s so tired, that she forgets to drop the ball from her mouth like she usually does when she brings it back, but instead she just keeps strolling around the yard with it by me, just in a daze from all the exercise that she’s getting.