A person the other day on the subway:

A (squat) (older middle-aged) (black) guy sitting down across the car from me with a red fez on and a brown jacket on over an orange vest with some kind of shirt beneath it, and on his lapel was a button with an old-timey stylized “7” on it and a very crisp thin border around its edge.

After a few stops, he pulled out a greasy half-eaten brown bag with cold popcorn in it, and he began to eat from that, mostly keeping his mouth closed as he chewed.

Practicing Spanish with my one (Mexican) coworker.

As part of my job at the resthome, a few times a week one of us has to pass out juice and milk after dinner to the residents who order that as part of their residence bill.

And, since my schedule has been on the lighter side lately, I’ve been the one who tends to do that, since it's only fair to even out the workloads.

So, after I finished passing out the juice and milk the other week, then, I bumped into my one (Mexican) coworker in the office.

“Thanks for passing the juice,” she was like.

Then, like I sometimes do, I began trying to translate what she just said into Spanish, since she lets me do that and it’s helpful to me to find out how something is phrased or how she would translate something.

So, I was like, “Gracias por…”

“…distribuir los jugos,” she was like, finishing the sentence for me where I had stopped since I wasn’t sure how something would go.

“Okay,” I was like, “Gracias por distribuir los jugos.”

“Si,” she was like, “Gracias por distribuir los jugos.”

Then, suddenly, I put on a character and mugged a disgusted and in-your-face crazy dramatic face at her and was like, “Has olvidado las leches” (‘You forgot the milk’), then I threw my hands up to the heavens with an exasperated expression and was like, “Ingrata!” (‘Ingrate!’).

That got a laugh out of her, and she was like, “Ingrata!”, repeating ‘Ingrate!’ to herself and laughing.

Start of a phone message from my one Tibetan coworker with an inappropriate sense of humor the other day…

…when she called to see if I could come into work:

“Tashi delek, [my first name]-la…”

(That’s like “hello,” then she used the respect particle with my name like I’ve been using with my coworkers when I joke with them.)

Isn't that great?

I love my coworkers, they're so nice and so much fun, and that's even apart from the fact that I get a Tibetan greeting left on my phone.

Discusson about our country with a Tibetan coworker.

The other week at the resthome I was talking with my one (block-y) (Tibetan) coworker about the direction of our country - she was born in Nepal to refugee parents, but is now an American citizen - and she agreed that it's difficult to know where things are going, and that people work so much and get so little in return.

She said, too, that like eight or nine years ago, she heard the Dalai Lama speak, and he said that the U.S. might not be great in twenty years.

"No way," I was like, and then I asked her exactly what he had said.

And, she said that he was giving a talk and he said that the U.S is a great country, but in twenty, thirty years, who knows. 

"I heard it," she was like.

"Oh," I was like, "Like an impermanence thing, like you never know when you're going to die, and a country can suddenly go downhill too."

"Yeah," she was like. 

Then, she was like, "He said that like eight, nine years ago, I heard it."

Event when reading at home the other night:

There's a small muted crisp snap with a tiny limited ting of glass just afterwards, and my Ikea wrinkled paper upright lamp over by my bookcase gets dimmer, since one of the three low-wattage light bulbs in it blew out.

I've had that lamp for years and years, too, and I think that this might be the first time that I lost a lightbulb in it.