A week or two after that at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I was working with my one (taller) (younger) (Latino-American) coworker again, and I had set out a bunch of word puzzles for everyone to do in between things, but it was hard and I was the only one that was really getting them, slowly getting one by one the last 5 or 6 of a list of words all by myself.
“DERIDER!”, I was like, solving the very last one.
“Is that a word?”, my one (Chinese from China) coworker asked.
“Yes,” I was like, “It’s one who derides,” to his continuing disbelief that that was a plausible word to put into a puzzle.
Later, too, my one (taller) (younger) (Latino-American) coworker was shaking his head at “DERIDER” and saying he didn’t think it was a word, and I was like, “Of course it is, what’s on top of de horse?”, and he was like, “DE RIDER,” laughing.
Still, though, he was shaking his head at that puzzle, and when we were back in the kitchen by the packing area, he said something about that and how you really couldn’t expect anyone to get that, and so I put on an intense voice and was like, “Hey, you fucked it up with your girlfriend and you suck at puzzles, I know, but don’t take your shit out on me!”
Throughout the night, too, I had been making fun of him for becoming a “normie,” asking him if he was working out his upper arm muscles for [name of a famous very mainstream campus bar].
“She was such a good influence on you, now you spend all your time looks-maxxing,” I was like, and he just turned to me and was like, “You know ‘looks-max’?”, and he then further explained that it’s a young person’s word and that he had never heard anyone older using it, and when I asked him about usage, he said it was mostly ironic, like a friend of yours gets a haircut and you’re like, “Hey, so you decided to looks-max, eh?”.
He was also saying that he reconnected with this girl from high school who he had a crush on back then, and she goes to the same university now and they had met there again, and she’s like a (Chinese) major and is a lot less alternative than his old girlfriend, so you could say he’s becoming a normie that way.
“But I am taking her to a house show next week,” he was like.
“But what if you see your old girlfriend there?”, I was like.
“Yeah, we might,” he was like, “But if she saw us, she would probably just leave.”
“How do you know she wouldn’t take off her leather bracelets and throw them at you?”, I was like (he had gotten her some expensive studded leather bracelets a while ago, and she always wears them). “She could make a scene.”
“She could,” he was like, laughing.
And, I asked him if he knew the Investigation Discovery channel – he didn’t – and then I told him that this sounded like a plot from Mean Girl Murders, where they’d have actors playing them in reenactments and this house show confrontation was the moment that made the alternative ex-girlfriend snap, and led to murder.
And, he admitted that he didn’t watch much true crime, but, “Actually, it sounds like that,” he was like.
He was also trying to justify himself and say that he wasn’t becoming too much of a normie, he still goes to house shows, but I said that people don’t change all at once, that that was still the effects of the good influence of his old girlfriend, and it was just cool vestigial behavior on his part.
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