By the time I got up around 1, and did the usual things, and told myself I really needed to go downtown, I left here around 4.
My first stop was at Dai Thanh where I got dried cuttlefish and peanuts and things, then I went over to the Amazon hub to pick up any bubble mailer I could recycle. I got 6 or 7 of them but something interesting happened this time. I went in and there's usually someone at a sort of podium near the front and this time it was an Asian gal maybe 5 foot nothing tall, who came out to "help" me get my bike in, which didn't improve things really and I muttered something about her making it worse between the three of us (myself, her, and the bike.
I parked by bike by the bike rack they have indoors there (I don't put the bike in, because if someone else comes with a bike they can't use the 2nd position because my bike has wide handlebars and is large in general) and got right to gathering what bubble mailers were there.
Well, Ms. Helpful followed me around closely and it didn't help that I found a smart phone in some kind of a rubber case sitting there and picked it up and said, "Did someone leave their phone here?" and I handed it to her and she said it was used in the store (maybe to take pictures of returns who knows). So she was following me around while I gathered the bubble mailers and I said I use them to ship things and I just come by when I'm in the area and pick them up, and she asked if I lived in San Francisco and I said that no, I live in San Jose, a city she may have heard of, kind of boring ... She said something like "What?" and I repeated that San Jose is boring. She perked right up and asked why, and I said that well, there's no night life and I've been watching what culture there is just leave this town and this was before the virus; the virus has only sped things up. She gushed that she was so glad I said that, and that she thought she was the only one who thought that, and so on. I went on to say that the people here are boring and that I keep meeting some really cool people but then I never see them again. It's the tech culture, I said, that people just work, work, work and live to work, they want to be robots. By this time I was going out the door and I'm not even curious about her because I'm not going to see her again.
On the ride back, I pondered how people seem to hear me speak and think I'm better off than I really am. American culture is transactional. Person A will be friends with Person B if Person B can benefit them. I don't have enough money to be "interesting".
I stopped at Nijiya on the way back and loaded up on stuff, then got back here. Tomorrow's a rain day. If a bit cold, it was a beautiful day with a neat sunset. And at the little free libraries I got a book from 2017 about Joni Mitchell and one called "Soul Mountain" about a Chinese guy who gets lung cancer and is about to die but then they find out it's gone and then he goes through all kinds of adventures. It won the Nobel Prize so it's probably pretty good.
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