“You know what, Dad? I think I’m going to look around some more.”
After my interview, I go to drown my sorrows at Amazing Stories, where Manny (aka Mansur Fathi: Most Likely to Succeed at Breaking Will Domenici Out of a Thought Spiral) is newly employed. The space used to be a nail salon, and sometimes if you breathe in really deeply you can still smell the carcinogens.
Manny, Javier, and I have a standing gig taking a first look at that week’s trade-ins, including some pieces that the owner, Jordan, gets off eBay. It’s not a particularly good haul this week, mostly 1990s X-Men that’s already been digitized on Marvel Unlimited, so it doesn’t take too long. Still, my stomach is rumbling by the end. Or maybe it’s just leftover nerves. “Guys, can we go over to the deli? I need a BLT or something.”
“Bring me something back,” Manny says, adding an unnecessary, “no piggie.” Manny isn’t a particularly observant Muslim, but he’s pretty firm about the no-pork thing. “I just don’t understand why you’d want to eat an animal that literally eats garbage,” he says whenever I have a ham sandwich.
“We didn’t ask you how your interview at the hospital went,” Javier says as we walk to the deli down the street. He does that a lot—replays conversations in his head so he can follow threads and tease out social cues that he can act on later.
“The interview went okay, but they can’t pay me, so it’s probably not worth it. I’m just afraid my mom’s going to make me do it ‘for the experience.’” I make air quotes.
“You can always look for another job that pays,” Javier says.
“Yeah, because jobs for high school sophomores grow on trees around here.”
“There’s a job right there.” Javier points to a sign literally in front of our faces, on the window of A-Plus Chinese Garden:
HELP WANTED:
SEEKING SUMMER MANAGEMENT INTERN TO HELP GROW OUR BUSINESS.
WEB PAGE DEVELOPMENT EXPERIENCE PREFERRED.
COME BE PART OF AN
A-PLUS TEAM!
I look at the sign and I can’t help it. I bark out a laugh. “Um, no,” I say, shaking my head.
“Why not?” asks Javier curiously.
I blink, and think. I do that a lot when I’m around Javier. Not only because he’s brilliant, but because he has this utterly objective view of the world that occasionally forces me to rethink my own biases.
When I contemplate it, I laughed because of the visual image of me passing out fortune cookies and rolling sushi. It could easily be a Saturday Night Live skit, with the lyrics “One of these things is not like the others” playing in the background.
My hunger pangs twist into shame. I think about my sister, and how she says that your reaction to cognitive dissonance says volumes about who you are.
Five seconds in, five seconds out.
I close my eyes and breathe in the warm June air. The scent of fried rice mingles with the smell of yeast from the bakery down the street.
The unsettled feeling in my stomach calms. I look back again at the HELP WANTED sign. It’s a good poster. The job’s an opportunity to manage a team and grow a small business. I have at least one of the skills they’re looking for. Whoever made the poster has hand-illustrated it with little anthropomorphized sushi rolls and dumplings with thought bubbles saying things like “A-Plus needs YOU!” In addition to a call-back number and an e-mail address, each of the little tear-offs at the bottom has a different emoji.
As gently as I can, I tear off the tab with the shrug emoji.
This Is My Brain on Twitter
JOCELYN
I would love to describe my family’s restaurant as a dive, but honestly it’s not cool enough to be considered one.
To be clear, the restaurant isn’t dirty—it’s just old. When my dad first visited A-Plus Chinese Garden, he was pleasantly surprised. There were no rat problems or fire hazards, and the building breezed through inspection. The decor wasn’t awful for a place that wasn’t really a sit-down spot—there were four booths with mostly intact red vinyl coverings, and room for a few tables. The walls were plain but didn’t need repainting. I hated the name, though.
“Isn’t that the name of a convenience store? Can we change it to ‘China Garden’ or something?” I knew there was no way he’d take the “Garden” out of the name. The word for garden in Mandarin is “yuan,” which is a homonym for money. You don’t mess with those things.
“No, no, no,” my dad insisted. “Keep A-Plus and we always be at top of search engine list.” I think he just didn’t want to spring for new signage. Six years later, same name, same ’80s decor. One winter I tried to dress the place up for the holidays, but my dad wouldn’t okay the purchase of Christmas lights. “You can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.”
Basically, when I look around the restaurant for a background image for our new Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts, I have no idea where to begin. It’s like how you can enter a room where someone’s thrown a banana into the trash, and at first you’re like, “Oh, shit, someone ate a banana?” Then you wait a few minutes, and you don’t even notice it—you’ve been desensitized to the smell.
I’m a little desensitized to design when it comes to our restaurant. I know it doesn’t look quite right, but it isn’t jarring to me anymore. More importantly, I have no idea how to fix it. I can’t even imagine it looking good, to be honest. Maybe if we made it completely dark and put in strobe lights. At least the floor doesn’t have any obvious stains—it’s a drab brown low-pile carpet that could probably hide a mass murder.
“Do you think we should take pictures in the bathroom?” I ask Priya when she lugs her camera and lighting gear in. “That’s the nicest part of the restaurant since Dad wallpapered it.”
“Don’t worry, I brought some tablecloths and scarves we can use as background, and we can put some food on some special serving plates,” says my genius friend.
Priya’s dad is an applied science professor at the college and her mom is a nurse, which means that she and her brother knew from an early age that they had to go into either engineering or medicine (personally, I also had business and law as options, which made my parents seem really open-minded). We had been friends for about two days when she told me her plan to sabotage her grades so that her parents would let her go to film school to study cinematography.
“Doesn’t it bug you, to have your parents think that you’ve failed?” I asked when she told me how she intentionally put down a few wrong answers for a math test.
“Getting a B isn’t failure,” she said, even though she knew that it kind of was, in our parents’ eyes.
“But don’t you ever think, ‘God, if I’m not any good at this crappy school in the middle of nowhere, how am I ever going to succeed in life?’”
“Einstein failed high school.”
“No he didn’t. That’s a myth.” My dad looked it up once when I used it as an excuse for getting a B plus.
“Fine, then. There are plenty of other people who didn’t get straight As who did great in life. You know how all those college counselors say that you don’t need to be well-rounded, if you’re well-flat?”