Some summertime tidbits…

…of my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker, at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) One day she turns to me, and she says that one of my problems is that I don’t eat enough protein and so my workouts don’t show enough results, and she offers to include me in on her next order for that for the shipping, if I want to buy some creatine powder with her from an online distributor.

2) One very hot day when she wears her long black skirt in, it looks super comfortable, so I say that maybe I should follow her lead and start wearing a skirt in for my uniform, although maybe the boss wouldn’t like it.

“Say you’re Scottish,” my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones is like. “A kilt.”

3) Another day her two (school-age) daughters are in and they have big bright neon accents on their clothes – one a neon green shirt and the other neon pink shorts – and so when my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker who’s off-shift comes in to pick them up and take them to a really cool playground on the other side of town, I keep making it “a thing” and asking her where her neon is.

Some restaurant happenings this summer…

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

1) Someone drops off a poster featuring a local garden walk, so I get a strip of paper and write it up so it says –

FEATURING [name of my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones]!

- and then I leave it out on the counter and show it to all my coworkers, and act like her garden is being featured on the local garden walk.

2) When it’s super-slow for a few weeks when students are gone and we make do just fine with two people on mid-week dinner shift, we all want to ask the (Thai) (husband) owner to maybe try that regularly for a few weeks, so someone puts it in the ear of his oldest daughter and she reaches out to him with that, to see if it was something he would consider doing.

(Yet another example of [Thai] discretion, to my mind.)

3) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker's shopping for crystals at a local (New Age) store inspired my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones to go shop for crystals, and she bought one to help her sleep better, and also one for beauty.

Ways of being in the world.

This summer, I was on a train ride, and the (white) woman next to me was (older) with a wrinkled face and she said something about travelling from Kentucky from some relatives to go see other relatives, the implication being that her living situation was a little unsettled, and we didn’t talk too much, but there was some kind of major sort of lower-middle class vibes coming off of her, like the kind of feeling you’d get from a person who watches too many soap operas.

And, she pulled out her smartphone, and ended up playing Candy Crush for most of the trip.

“Ah!”, I thought. “Finally, I see the kind of person who plays Candy Crush!”

(Black) (gender-transgressive) behavior.

On a trip this past summer, I found myself at a bar that was suddenly filled with a lot of (black) (gay) people, including many men who were affectedly (sissy) or had (gender-transgressive) behavior – like, full beards and big sunglasses but huge poofy scarves, that kind of thing.

And, if you stopped yourself and looked around, it was HEALTHY vibes, not at all like that (predominantly white) (weirdo) (nerd-culture) kind of thing that's all like “let’s all dope up on T or estrogen and go play some D&D."

It really makes you realize how that segment of nerds has claimed as “natural” some kind of stuff that is highly subculture-specific, where they want to make themselves “transgender” writ large, when it’s actually just eating too many Fritos and dying your hair blue.

It’s totally like bad science megalomania, imposing some purportedly objective way of being onto the larger world, in a blatant act of colonialism that they can’t recognize because they’re so deeply-embedded in the ideology.

False knowledge claims, dependence on what others think… That kind of thing just never ends well, saddly.

The only thing headed their way is fragility and collapse; something like that just eats itself up from the inside, always, the only question is how long will it take and with how much collateral damage.