I have family on Long Island. I don't think I've ever gone into a restaurant there that didn't have a signed photo of Billy Joel hanging up. That motherfucker eats out.
I took German in high school and forgot it all immediately. A decade later I found myself in India studying Malayalam, the language of Kerala which is the southern-most state in the country. Very hard language to learn but as I was learning its formal grammar I was like, wait a minute this is very familiar. Turns out a German monk in the 19th Century visited Kerala and gave Malayalam its first formal grammar, which was basically just German's grammar. So it wasn't totally useless.
I got out of the language requirement in college by taking computer science courses, which counted as "language" only because programming languages are called what they are. It is just the dumbest fucking shit. If they were called "paradigms" or "code instruction sets" or something like that (which would be just as or more accurate than "languages") it never would have occurred to anyone to let us computer nerds -- who are already not exactly well-rounded in general -- to get out of learning a real fucking language.
My dad (a chemo patient) was in the hospital with kidney problems late last year. At one point a couple of palliative care nurses came in to see him and basically told him he was dying and should go into hospice rather than continuing with chemo. My dad initially agreed but later changed his mind and told me he felt he had been pressured by these nurses. I found myself wondering if these nurses worked on commission or something and got paid by insurance companies to convince old people (on very expensive chemotherapy regimens) to give up. One of the nurses looked exactly like Jesus (the traditional white Jesus of wall art fame) and I wondered if he intentionally cultivated that specific look.
Unfortunately, my dad died less than two weeks later, so I can't say these nurses were wrong.
Back when I was a kid my mom read Herman Wouk's The Winds of War -- and it took her my entire childhood to do it. She only read when we were on vacation, which was only like one week a year. I'm not entirely sure she ever finished the book. I'm also waiting for her to finish the sweater she started knitting for me in 1978.
I bought a house two years ago and had a plumber come out to install a new water heater. He asked me where the water meter was and I had to say "fuck if I know". He said lots of people just let their water account lapse and then remove the meter and tap directly into the water line in the street and get free water. He assumed that the previous owner of my house had done this; I was pondering whether this was a bad thing or not when he found the actual water meter out in the yard under a metal cover. Good news? Probably not -- it turns out my house water is supplied by a very cheap independent local water authority, but they had to go into bankruptcy along with the city and apparently some Saudis are planning to buy it to provide water to grow alfalfa for their racehorses.
In college I arranged a co-op at IBM. They made me take a drug test which I failed (for marijuana). A person from IBM's HR called me and said literally "you need to clean up your act" and they brought me in to do the co-op anyway. I have no idea what the fuck that was all about.
I also got pulled over for speeding one time and the cop smelled the joint I had been smoking. Luckily he let me go with just a speeding ticket, but he made a point of scolding me -- not for driving while high but because I was 49 at the time. He told me it was time for me to grow up. I was seriously enraged by that but of course I kept it to myself.
I have family on Long Island. I don't think I've ever gone into a restaurant there that didn't have a signed photo of Billy Joel hanging up. That motherfucker eats out.