English vocab variability.

The other week, the one official at the Romanian consulate kept saying "Sars," even though everyone here says "Covid."

I'm like 100% positive that she's translating from the disease word that they must be using in Romanian.

A Dream of Wagner.

A few months ago, I dreamnt -

I'm like two-thirds towards the back of a big formal sloping theater that's fairly full and that I can't see the walls of, and a high-cost production of Wagner's Goetterdaemmerung is playing onstage, and there's some kind of wedding feast scene happening with a lot of drab but artfully-dressed people standing around the edges of the stage as well as this giant nineteenth-century-looking clown up there centrally with a white painted face and a frilly collar and a stumpy cap, him like being all very large and very very white and completely the center of attention.

And, my mother is with me, and she leans over to talk to me.

"This is really good, but I have to go to the bathroom!", she was like, and she gets up to go to the aisle, and I'm not sure if they'll let her back in until a change of scene or even act, and I think that it's her decision to miss something or not, though, though I wish she wasn't so old and didn't have those kinds of bladder problems.

Later, I'm in a different auditorium that's more like a high school auditorium with a stage at the side of a gymnasium, and there's hardly anyone there and I'm standing right up in front of the crappy stage, and this one slightly off doctoral student who I know from years ago is standing there singing, and it seems improvised but also part of Goetterdaemmerung, like it's some kind of amateur community production, and for some reason I'm profoundly uneasy with what's happening, perhaps because I don't actually think it's Goetterdaemmerung that they're doing.

Then, I'm outside on a grass parking lot and a high school friend who I haven't seen in years and who married an evangelical bodybuilder is getting into a car, and she's telling me that it's good and she liked it, but it was going on for too long and that she has places to be.

And then, I woke up.

. . .

My mom on late Dec. news:

 "They always write year-end reviews of this and of that because they don't feel like working. Why would you even buy a paper?"

. . .

(I haven't heard her say this for at least a decade, but I picked up a paper before New Year's and saw year-end listicles and the like and I thought about her saying this years ago.)

Resthome conversations (4 of 4): Missing sandwiches.

Also also also at the resthome last month, the one (very chill) resident told me out of the blue that she misses sandwiches and that they don't serve enough sandwiches there.

"They do sometimes," I was like, and I also reminded her that for any meal she could always substitute a sandwich if she ordered ahead of time, since that's something that they do for people who don't like either of the two meal options that they have for every meal.

So, at the very next opportunity, I got the menu for the next day and we looked ahead, and she ordered a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch instead of the 2 options that they had, and it turned out, too, that one of the actual meal options for dinner was a barbecue sandwich.

"Do you still want the grilled cheese sandwich for lunch?", I was like. "If you order the grilled cheese sandwich for lunch and the barbecue sandwich for dinner, you'll get two sandwiches tomorrow."

"And you'll get a happy camper," she was like.

Addendum.

It was very interesting to see how it played out that the resthome gave us all Thanksgiving turkeys for Thanksgiving, since so many of the people who work there are from other countries.

A lot of people just didn't know what to do with them!

I think my one (edgy) (Ethiopian) coworker even gave hers away to my one (older) (Chinese-Filipino) coworker, since he said he'd take it.

Resthome conversations (3 of 4): Thai kitchen worker.

Also also last month at the resthome, I bumped into the one (Thai) kitchen worker who I had discussed turkey cooking ideas with after we had gotten free Thanksgiving turkeys at work.

At the time, she hadn't been quite sure what to do, since in Thailand you'd either boil or grill a big piece of meat like that, she said, and boiling seemed like it wouldn't be right and grilling wouldn't work with the weather, so she didn't quite know what to do.

As it turns out, her (Thai) boyfriend made a really nice black-and-white-pepper rub and ended up grilling it for her, and she made a nice sauce with garlic and onions and fish sauce and they ate all the meat with that, too.

Resthome conversations (2 of 4): Kitchen manager.

Also last month at the resthome, I saw the one (thickly built) (Ghanaian) kitchen manager and I said hello to him and I asked him how he was, and though he usually says something like, "I'm blessed," this time he was a bit more elaborate and he was like, "I am very good, God is good to me."

That threw me a bit since it was a bit of an unexpected twist on what he usually says, but then I was like, "I'm happy to hear that, the next time you talk to Him, please thank Him for the election results," and at that he laughed, in an apparently hearty chuckle.