A visit to the local supermarket: Met an older (white) lady.

The other Monday I went to the supermarket after a long day of working from home – I often go around 7 or 8pm; the place is close by, and is open till 10pm – and I was picking through the on-sale  $.69/lb vine-ripened tomatoes when an older (white) woman w/short hair and lots of gold jewelry and a slightly sparkly black top and matte black pants moved in beside me, and I immediately said, “Sorry,” and gave her room.

“No need to say ‘Sorry,’ hon,” she was like.  “You were here, and I’m here now.”

Then, after a short pause, she was like, “But I’m from New York, maybe I’m just different like that.”

Then, she was like, “And these are good prices.  You can only get better in New York’s Chinatown, and barely even then.”

“I know,” I was like. “That zucchini is forty-nine cents a pound for the second week in a row.  I got some last week, and it’s really good quality, too.”

Then, I added that the prices were so good, my grocery bill was like twenty to thirty bucks a week, unless it was a week when I was buying bricks of coffee or a big bag of rice or a new tin of olive oil because I had finally run out of it or something like that.

“What, are you a vegetarian?”, she was like.

“No, I just cook cheap at home, I’d rather get a hamburger out at a bar or something,” I was like.

“Oh,” she said.

Next thing I know, I run into her over by the carrots, and she asked me what I was buying so many carrots for.

“I don’t like breakfast foods,” I said, “So in the morning I have home-made hummus on toast, and I cut up raw carrots and eat that along with it, that’s what I tend to eat on weekdays.”

“What do you put in there?  Garbanzo beans you soak yourself?” –

“Yeah.”

- “Tahini?” –

“Yeah.”

- “Some garlic and olive oil?” –

“Yeah.”

“That’s nice,” she was like.

Like a minute later, we ran into each other over by the grapefruit.

“Ten for a dollar,” she was like.  “Can you believe that?  But those lemons are expensive.”

I then asked her if she was still in New York, or like how long ago she had moved to the city.

“I still live there,” she was like.  “But my son lives here in [a neighborhood about 12 blocks west].  I come down here to go to the dollar store across the street, Mondays is half off, and I always shop here, the prices are so good.”

Then, she was like, “And did you know that if you buy more than fifty bucks they’ll drive you home?”

“Really?”, I was like.  “Is that like a thing?”.

“I don’t know,” she was like, “Maybe they just do it for me.  The driver’s a real nice guy, his son is Mexican too and is on full scholarship to Lawrence.  That’s where the Kennedies go.”

“Good for that kid,” I was like.  “His dad must be very proud.”

At that point I moved away to get green peppers and our shopping trips didn’t synch up again, but later I was picking out cucumbers and I noticed her over by the wall by this door that I had never noticed before and must be the store office, and there was this older (Mexican) guy talking with her and some younger (Mexican) guy standing with them too.

“You’re the best,” the older (Mexican) guy was telling the older (white) woman.

“No, *he’s* the best!”, she said, pointing to the younger (Mexican) guy.

“No, *you’re* the best,” the older (Mexican) guy told the older (white) woman again.

“No, *he’s* the best!”, she said, pointing to the younger (Mexican) guy and laughing.

After I checked out, I was double-checking my bill and then went to return my cart in the rack outside the doors, and just as I was walking past the main entrance again, the older (white) woman emerged with the younger (Mexican) guy.

“This is my friend,” she was like.  “He’s the man whose son goes to Lawrence.”

“Congratulations,” I was like.  “That’s quite an achievement.”

“You live near here?”, he was like.

“Yeah, just a few blocks that way.”

He then offered me a ride too, but I patted my belly and laughed and said I could use the exercise, and we all parted ways.

Great night clubbing: Valentine’s Day decorations left up.

The other week I went to that one late-night club that I like, after some time at my one (half Sudanese) (half British) friend’s (half Sudanese) (half British) sister’s go-out-for-dinner b-day party, and after one drink at a Mexican restaurant that was shutting down, in order to kill a bit of time for the club to fill up.

When I walked in, my eyes were bowled over by 80s neon colors everywhere, glowing even more since they were bathed in black light: there was paper chains the kind like you’d see on an old-fashioned Christmas tree, and a ton of plush hearts suspended from the ceiling that were artfully bound in industrial twine, and even a black square covered in a woven pattern of industrial twine.

And, of 2 drag queens who walked in together, one had on a blonde wig that glowed an unearthly white.

Towards the end of the night, I was talking with a (mid-20s) (Mexican-American) guy who was born and grew up in the city, and he was telling me how neither him nor his friend who he came with have cell phones and they were talking to some girl at the last club after they went there after they got out of work, and now they were waiting around to see if she’d show up like she said she would.

Then – and I’m not sure how we transitioned topics, maybe it was from him pointing out his (Mexican-American) friend – we started talking about whether overall Mexicans tend to be hairy.

I have theories about that – the more Aztec-looking they are, the less they have – but I didn’t get a chance to offer that up, since the next thing I know the guy is telling me that he likes rimming and this one (Mexican) girl he dated had the most perfect round brown ass, and there was like this light black peachfuzz all over it that you could see when you went down on her, on that particular side.

He also was saying he likes to get rimmed, but you can’t depend on that too often.

At that point, he had mentioned a bit earlier that he had a girlfriend, and I mentioned that I hoped for his sake she did that.

“She does, but I kind of have to make her,” he was like, "because she's my girlfriend."

“Well,” I was like, “I hope at least for her sake that you shave your ass and wash up a bit, for her sake.”

“I try to clean up,” he was like, “But there’s only so much you can do.”

Then, he shrugged and was like, “Sex is dirty.”

For a brief moment it seemed like he was just explaining his inability to clean up by talking about the nature of the body parts involved, but suddenly a quiet self-satisfied smile flashed across his face and it seemed like I wasn’t there any more because the phrase or the idea got him off and took him to another place where he made a woman go down and root around in the matted shit-clumped hairs of his asshole, and from wherever he was, he kind of repeated himself again to himself, but just a little louder, “Sex is dirty.”

At some time during the night, too, he said he had recently come back to brown girls and their “sweet brown pussy”, and he was currently dating an Indian (-American? from India? Native American?).

(Now that I think of it, maybe it’s best if she was from India, since people who come from that part of the world are often accustomed to unsanitary conditions.)

And to think we had that conversation while surrounded by futuristic neon.  The broadly-built lesbian coatcheck girl even had a neon traffic jacket like road crews wear, but that was it, nothing under it, each side of the vest swinging over to cover a tit.

I complimented her on it, and she said she’d had it for a while.

That club really is like another world.  Often times I wake up the next day and wonder how I’m still on the same earth.

Apartment ingenuity: Chapstick substitute.

The other week my lips were very very chapped and I didn’t have any chapstick around since I never need it, and at first I thought I’d just suck it up and deal with it, but then later I dipped my finger inside the rim of a pretty recently opened-up bottle of vegetable oil and spread that on my lips. 

It really works well, if you re-apply.

My mother's repeated lament...

...about me and my brother, as examples of many of our generation:

"You guys work so hard and don't have much to show for it."

She compares us to herself or to my dad at the same age, and sees how we're much poorer and much more financially unstable. 

She's said this lament on the phone to me several times, when we discuss the state of the country.

Danger of workouts: Sore abdominal muscles.

One (black) bartender at the student bar had told me last spring about this ten-minute-a-day workout that he claims gives you ripped abs if you do it faithfully.

I had been doing it now and then into the summer, but lapsed.

Then, a few Sundays ago, during a yoga workout at home, I decided to throw in that abs workout in the middle.

For the next 2 days, my entire abdomen was sore from muscle ache, and not only that, but my brain would mis-read that ache in different ways - as hunger, sometimes, and other times as nausea.

Story from an Animator Colleague: His experience with ESP.

After the art school's holiday party back in Dec., I went out for a nightcap afterward with my one animator colleague, who's a pretty committed skeptic, and since we always talk about cults when we get together, we ended up getting into the subject of the supernatural.

"I did have one experience," he was like, after we had talked of the supernatural for a while, and he then began telling me about how years ago back when he was a bartender in New York there was this beautiful woman who was dating the other bartender and who would come in every once in a while and sit at the bar and drink till the guy she was dating would get off of work.

One night, she came in and was really drunk, and her boyfriend was pretty busy, so she started talking to my animator colleague, and all of a sudden out of nowhere she blurted out, "I have ESP."

"Sure you do," he was like.

At that, stone-cold serious, she was like, "Give me your hand," which he did, and then she sat there at the bar holding it with a serious look on her face and her eyes closed.

Then, her eyes flung open and she was like, "Your birthday is January 10th."

And, she was right.

Like right then, her boyfriend got freed up, and he interrupted them, and my animator colleague never got a chance to talk with her that night again before she left the bar.

Anyhow, weeks later, she came in again, and so my animator colleague struck up a conversation with her, and he gingerly broached the subject of her ESP.

"You remember how you were in here a few weeks back, and you guessed my birthday...?", he was like.

"Oh yeah," she was like.  "I've been doing that for years, it was the first time I ever got it right."

Evocative phrase from my one Asian-Canadian friend.

I've noticed that my one Asian-Canadian friend gets very openly thoughtful if you get him talking on the right subjects, esp. if he's had a drink or two in him.

Like last month, me and him and a woman I know were having drinks, and somehow they started talking about the future, and the woman (who's single) started talking about how she's been planning to have children for a while though she hasn't met the right guy and might do it on her own, etc., and kept talking for a bit more about that.

"But those are dreams, and dreams change," he said forcefully but sympathetically, as he began to reply to everything that she had just said.