First Life

Home from work. I went to jin shin, then on to work, stopping only to get some food (which I never did eat). It's best not to eat before jin shin - but I didn't think I'd be happy going to 4-something with nothing. I stopped at Tiny's, which is a strange and old-fashioned greasy spoon next to the I-5 . Last time I was there - who knows how long ago - they had about 20% of the floorspace dedicated to a cheesy gift shop with things like commercially-made dreamcatchers and Leanin' Tree cards. That's gone, and now they have a hole that they will plug soon, the woman said, with tables. I noted their menu: the largest burger they have is the John Wayne, which has (according to the sign) 2 meat, 2 cheese, bacon, ham, lett, tom, jalapeno, pineapple, and goop. I might've left a few things off that I can't remember. Their second largest burger is the George Bush. They didn't specify anything about it but the price ($5.99). The whiteboard auxilliary menu was written in red and blue marker. I ordered a number 1 breakfast: egg and hash browns, sausage, and one piece of toasted bread, which then sat in my artroom all day while I beat on the computers and talked with Alex and Thanh. Alex is my person, now, which he thinks is all right. [Alex is the artist I brought to school a couple of years ago for the workshops we had instead of going to Centrum. School immediately hired him, which I felt could've been a bad thing for him, but so far so good.] When I heard that our techie was not coming back I secretly hoped Alex would get that position. He told me today that the computer lab has been completely dismantled and we have been thrown back into the stone age. I was... not just shocked, but... shocked and horrified. No one, they said, had been assigned places yet, and Thanh, who is always smiling and laughing, said he wasn't worried, "I'll be somewhere." It seems it takes 7 years in a prison camp or a case of multiple sclerosis to make people laugh all the time - now why is that? Maybe we'd've been laughing even without misfortune.