Have I been sucked into a new dietary trend?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happenings on a weekend double-shift…

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

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

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

(They were.)

. . .

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

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

. . . 

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She could,” he was like, laughing.

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

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

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

Break-up (1 of 2): Schtick.

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

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

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

“What did you do?”, I added.

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

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

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

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

And, he laughed.

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

And, he laughed again.

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

Dust-up.

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

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

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

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

And, he said that he would.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Community solar.

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

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

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

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

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

Some Halloween levity this past Halloween…

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

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

“No,” I’m like.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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