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.