Dig him up and shake his hand, appreciate the man

A little over a week ago I went to Chipotle with a friend of mine for lunch. We ordered our food, and as we went to sit at a table, a Korean guy walked up to my friend, looked at him for a second, and said, "Where you been, Mothaaaafuckaaaaa?"

Turned out he was the sushi chef at the place my friend always used to go with his ex-girlfriend. My friend introduced us, then they sat and talked for about five minutes. The sushi chef invited him to come back to the restaurant.

"I miss you. All of us miss you. You come back next week, okay?"

My friend said, "Okay. I'll come by next Thursday."

On Wednesday my friend texted me: What time are you done teaching?

I don't know, probably around eight, why?

We should go get sushi. It'll be my treat.

Okay. I can't turn an offer like that down. But don't expect me to put out later.

Alright, I won't. Let me know when you're done, and I'll meet you there.

Sounds good.

The reception my friend got at the sushi restaurant was like nothing I've ever seen before. The hostess saw him first (obviously) and said, "What happened? I know! You two broke up! Good to see you again!"

Then the sushi chef saw him and yelled out, "HEY!!! Look who it is! But today's not Thursday. I woke up today and was so sad that I had to wait another day to see you, but here you are. Good to see you!"

I kid you not, every single person who worked there came up to him that night to welcome him back and tell him how much they missed him. Even the owner. We got free sushi. My friend got free sake. You'd think he was some sort of a celebrity. I guess he and his girlfriend went there a LOT. It was a very surreal experience. We even tried two rolls that my friend had "created" with the sushi chef. They were delicious.

A few of the employees apologized for not recognizing him sooner, but said it was because he was there with me instead of his ex. Every single one of them had to talk about her, and how they'd seen her since, but not him, and how they liked him better.

The next day he asked me what I thought about the place while we were eating lunch.

"Well, apparently you're a friendly son-of-a-bitch away from campus. Everybody loves you there."

"I must be. It was good to see all those guys again. I'll need to go back on a semi-regular basis."

"Yeah, you should. Let me know. I'll go back. [The chef] was out of control, but it was fun. I still can't get over how much everyone there seemed to love you."

"That was nice. It was funny who even the ones who didn't recognize me at first came over to talk."

"They just didn't recognize you because you weren't there with . . . some bitch." (I forgot that he doesn't like to use the names of ex-girlfriends until I was almost through the sentence.)

My friend eyed the table next to us (which happened to be full of women) nervously. "Could you say that a little louder?"

"What? If I say it with a smile on my face it's not derogatory."

But now the snow is gone

It rained pretty much all day yesterday. As you can imagine, that much precipitation is pretty rare around here. Someone I follow on Twitter even posted this: Dear Las Vegas: please google "desert" k, thanks. Nobody listened to her, though. It kept raining.

I was walking somewhere mid-day, and when I stepped out into the rain, some cold water dripped down off the roof and onto the back of my neck. That's the thing about living someplace where you hardly ever get rain or snow, you forget to watch out for stuff like that. It was cold. It's times like that I'm glad I don't live somewhere colder. You know, like with snow and stuff. Where you have to worry about trees dumping the snow off their branches, onto your head, and down the back of your neck.

That hasn't always been the case. I've lived in some cold places. I mean COLD places. Like, you're so excited when the temperature finally hits 50 degrees sometime in May that you're out in shorts, t-shirt and sandals and thinking about going for a swim, even though the water temperature in the lake is probably still somewhere in the 30s because the ice just barely melted.

I recently saw a news headline that said they had made it illegal for truck drivers and bus drivers to text while on the road. That, combined with the cold rain water dripping down the back of my neck made me think of some of the things that happened my senior year of high school. Like the fact that one of the bus drivers would READ western novels while driving a busload of kids around on windy mountain roads. You know, because THAT's safe.

One day we were driving the 35 miles or so to school in a snow storm (with the regular bus driver, not the Louis L'amor fan). We're talking blizzard conditions. Like, the only way you could tell where the road went was by looking at the whiteness in front of you, and knowing you were on the road because there weren't any trees. It was kind of scary being that visibility was only about 30 feet anyway. That was before the windshield wipers iced up. The bus driver was faced with a dilemma. He couldn't keep going without being able to clear off the windshield, but he also couldn't stop the bus because if he did there is no way he would have been able to get it moving again. THAT's how much snow was on the road. So he called me to the front of the bus, had me crawl into the small space to his left, reach out the window into the freezing snow and wind, and bang the windshield wiper on the windshield to break the ice off. It was freeeeeeeeeeeezing (yes, that many Es). But I saved the day. We made it to school safely.

By noon, the school had decided to send us back home, so we loaded up on the bus, repeated the procedure. Arrived home safely, despite the fact that they waited until the bus was on the road before they CLOSED THE HIGHWAY. The school district sent a bus full of high school kids traveling home on a snowy mountain road that they knew was about to be closed because of the terrible weather conditions.

Sometimes I wonder how I even survived to see my college years.