Postcards from Hippietown

• My boss/the cook speaks Pidgin (her daughter had diaper rash and so now I have two new vocabulary words to name "down there") and writes poetry.
• Everybody is psychic here, and some of them actually are the real deal. My coworker "Martha" can tell anybody's birthday with a glance, and predicts what kind of day we'll have: "Slow and steady all morning, and then we'll get a big rush around 1:30". And she's never wrong either. One of our regulars is clairaudient (so, she hears voices but isn't schizophrenic).
• Which is why the local joke is that this is the only town with 50,000 channels and no TVs.
• Elrond's (my roommate) boss decided to take a vow of silence based on a dream he had. Also, his driveway is haunted by a 16 year old Apache warrior; he was very, very upset with the messiness of the yard, so they cleaned it up for him.
• Everybody-but-everybody has a Sanskrit name here--Dakshina, Divyo, Shanti, Sukhama--but none of them are Indian.
• A drum-circle, suffused with sage and pot smoke, is considered a wild night on the town.
• Impromptu May-pole dances.
• "You have really great energy; maybe we had a soul-connection in a past life" is a ordinary reaction upon meeting a new acquaintence.
• "Manifest" is a transitive verb used in everyday conversation, as in "I'm manifesting new professional opportunities."
• There are four kinds of people here: American Indians, Hispanics, transplanted Europeans, and refugees from Minnesota winters.
• A normal Tuesday afternoon will find me at home, Ravi Shankar on the stereo, Superhit burning in front of the kitchen Buddha, and Elrond making miso soup and chanting with his mala beads.
• I no longer find any of this all that unusual. It's alternately fascinating and irritating.