New bar in my new neighborhood.

Last week I had a long day, and at the end of it I went down to this bar a few blocks away from my house to grab a drink and read a book... The bar has this hand painted plywood sign above the door and looked dirty, so I've been wanting to try it out for a while.

I went in, and there was no one my age - the bartender ("Phyllis") was this older (white) woman with graying hair who looks like she's been around the block, and the clientele was a couple older Mexicans, and a later an older (black) guy walked in (though it seemed like he was speaking some African language on his cell phone?).

Anyhow, the beer was like $1.75 for a mug, and the bartender was chatty... She had this kind of low-class (white) accent, and was telling me how she was living with her aunt right now but looking to move out - she had moved in with a boyfriend and it hadn't worked out - but she had to save up, and the money was shitty... She also was saying how she grew up in the city in the Puerto Rican neighborhood, which used to be all Polish and Italian, "but then it changed".

That kind of race talk made me a little edgy, and then out of nowhere she started talking in rapid Spanish to one of the Mexican customers, and then when some (white) guy who had walked in asked her about it, she switched back to talking slowly in her low-class (white) accent and was like, "I started learning last year, I got bored," and when the Mexican guy ordered some sort of soda, she held up a straw and asked him what it was in Spanish, and then, looking kind of bored, repeated the word in a near-flawless accent.

When I left, I walked by like two yuppie bars full of (white) people my age or slightly older.

Needed for my (new) apartment...

...(i.e., My Haven of Peace and Light):

- coat-tree (wooden).
- small shoerack (wooden).
- a couple smaller bookcases from IKEA.
- a couple hanging plants (spider).

Addendum addendum.

I also forgot -

At the gym that night, the mix-tape they had on was really unusual and had a ton of Nile Rodgers on it, and even included Diana Ross's "I'm Coming Out", which I kept humming the rest of my workout after I heard it.

Afterwards, I went to go take a shower in the (deserted) locker-room before heading to the student bar, and the song was still in my head, so I was humming it... And then someone walked in, and all of a sudden I wondered what they might have thought, and so quit.

Addendum.

I forgot -

It really was time to move from my old neighborhood.

At the swingers bbq, a friend of the swinger-woman was a local non-kinky businesswoman, and she was really drunk, and kept telling me all night about how she had an offer to be the head of a non-profit in my old neighborhood, but there was all this pressure to move there and give up her apartment downtown, but she couldn't do it.

"It's Mayberry!", she was like.

In retrospect, there's a lot of truth to that - everywhere you go, you run into people you know, whether you like it or not.

For example, my one friend who's a (tenured) prof was having a drink with an undergraduate advisee of hers whose senior thesis she's supervising, and the girl stayed to drink with us.

As it turns out, 2 of her friends were in my section - and 1 of them was the one that transferred out. Erp. The girl was like, "Yes, [the one who stayed] and [the one who left] were even in the same section together for a while!"

But, luckily I just said that I knew them from the class, and didn't say I had TAed them.

(intervening post.)

(Odd odd week -

I lost my really really cool white cap I got for $14 at Marshall's the 3rd time I wore it, and can't find it anywhere. As the stoics would, I keep repeating to myself, "Did I think that this fabric object would really last forever?". Alternately, I tell myself the gods are punishing me for all that jauntiness.

Also, I woke up the other night with hives on my scrotum.)

I've been feeling beat up all over like with a baseball bat.

Not sure why lately, probably because I've been going a million miles an hour. Last Thurs. I didn't even realize till 5pm that I hadn't had lunch...

That day my schedule was:

8:30am - up and working translating Greek.
9:45am - on the train to school (wrote up course feedback for prof, reviewed prosposal draft on train.
11:00am - at school looking through reviews of the course as a whole I TAed, and me as a TA.
12:00pm - dissertation prosoposal presentation, then talk with people after.
1:50pm - meeting with a masters student who I'm going to be teaching a class with to go over the syllabus and readings a bit.
3:00pm - meeting with my one (black) (female) dean about various shit.
4:00pm - at the main library on campus to write up shit from my meeting with the masters student.
5:00pm (till 7:00pm!) - working on a Latin exam for a summer program that I needed to turn around and send back by the next day.

That made for a ten-and-a-half hour day. After that, I checked email and dicked online a bit to relax, then hit the gym (and I read Gregory the Great when I was on the elliptical for 20 minutes), then I was at the student bar to drink with a professor friend, which was at 10pm, and I didn't get out of there till 1am...

About classicists.

I was thinking the other day that classicists are like the catholics of protestant polemic, while historical linguists are like the protestant-heros of protestant polemic:

The classicists worship old dictionaries and grammars, while historical linguists are independent thinkers who abhor that idolatry and think for themselves, and thereby come to the truth.

I also hate how classicists rigidly classify uses of cases. If the uses were so well-defined, how did they ever change? It might be helpful to a certain point for people learning the languages to think like that, but it doesn't necessarily reflect how the language worked, always - cases could blur together, or bear multiple connotations at once.

Bad omens?

My Haven of Peace and Light - i.e., my new apartment, as opposed to my old apartment ("The Danish Haven") - seemed good, but there's a few things that went wrong...

The bathtub faucet is broken, so when you pull the thing to turn the shower on, like 2/3 of the water keeps coming out through the faucet head, and only 1/3 through the showerhead.

The kitchen cabinets are small, so I had to hammer in cup-holding hooks underneath the cupboard, and I felt sick when I did it since I had had a cup of strong Turkish coffee just prior, and between that and leaning across the kitchen sink with my head back, I got majorly dizzy.

Plus, after I put up the hooks, they were too close together, so all the coffee cups just barely touch each other as they hang, and you have to carefully take them down.

Also, blood mysterously appeared and got tracked across my IKEA natural-fiber carpet. I cut my finger putting up the hooks, but didn't notice any blood, though later when I went into the sunroom, I looked back and there were clumps of blood tracked across the carpet... I got most of it off with wet paper towels, but I have no idea where the bloodcame from... There was a little pool by the floor of the sink, so I looked up but didn't see anything - I kind of expected blood dripping from the ceiling, like in "The Exorcist" or "The Amityville Horror" or something - though it def. was blood, I swiped some up with my finger and sniffed it, and it smelled copper-y.