Very cute toddler.

A few weeks ago I had caught a mild cold and was resting up to kick it ASAP, but the weather was nice one day, so I walked to this nice park by my house and sat out a bit to enjoy the evening sun.

As I did that, this (Chinese) family with 2 kids walked by, one a toddler holding a big bright blue ball that he had to stick both arms out around in order to carry it and even then he could just barely hold it.

As he was walking past, he saw something to his right and turned his head, and as he looked that way, he began just veering off to the right in the same direction he was looking without realizing he was doing that.

Then, he hit an upraised patch of grass and stumbled and shook his head, and then came back to and toddled off faster after his parents, who had gotten a few feet ahead of him.

Addendum.

I forgot –

I also had made one other sign, with a smiley face in an elaborate head dress next to a tomahawk and below the words –

HAVE A VERY TRIBAL DAY.

. . .

As my roommate said, “I think we can make this tribal joke go on for a very long time.”

One day when she got home after work to rest up from her cold and I was out-and-about somewhere, she texted me:

Yup, another evening laid up sick.  Hmmm maybe I’ll put on some tribal drumming, meditate, then dance to a healing tribal chant...just as soon as I sl[ip]

on this cute tribal print top I bought on sale! Ha

. . .

Roommate antics.

Because I tend to go to bed around an hour after my roommate does and get up around a half hour after my roommate leaves for work, I’ve been leaving notes on the mirror, e.g. –

GOOD MORNING, BEAUTIFUL!

- and –

TODAY’S GOING TO BE A GOOD HAIR DAY.

WHY?

BECAUSE YOU’VE GOT EXCELLENT HAIR – ALWAYS!

- although unfortunately rain moved in overnight with that last one after I went to sleep and she woke up with a head of frizz to get that note.

Coincidentally, the day after she told me about the New Age pussy tribe meeting, I got a clothing store flier in the mail, and flipping through it I found out that one women’s insert advertised modern “tribal” patterns, with a picture of two slender models dressed up in vaguely southwestern patterned tops and pants.

So, I hung that up on the mirror, and put a note saying “Which tribe?”, with an arrow pointing to the fashion insert’s description of “tribal”, and she left a reply note saying it was the “hot momma fashion tribe, bitch”.

The next week, I re-used the fashion insert, only I made speech balloons and put them up next to the models’ mouths, so one said –

“Is it me, or is that tribe member ‘Full-of-Smoking-Hotness’ looking in the mirror?” –

and so that the other one said –

“It is her.  And I heard she can cook, too.”

- since I had showed my roommate how to make homemade pasta sauce earlier that night, since she doesn't really know how to cook all that much.

In the morning, when I woke up and went into the bathroom, I found a thank you note that she had left, saying that she was charmed by the drawing, and that as a tribal token of appreciation, she was giving me a single eagle feather (and she had a drawing of an eagle feather on the page beneath the writing).

Opinion: Slavic expression of emotion.

My one (Russian) friend and I were talking about how a lot of Slavs don't like Americans because they're fake, and he said that he didn't find them fake at all, but they take a little getting used to.

"I've had some people tell me that you never can tell what an American is thinking," I was like, "but on the other hand with Slavs you always know how someone is feeling, what you see is what you get."

"But there's a downside to that, too," he was like, and he began to explain how growing up he would go to a store or a government bureau and he would stand there and have to anticipate how the woman was feeling today, would she do her job or would you have to do something to try to get her to do her job, but if you tried that last part and it didn't fit her mood, would that make her even less likely to do her job.

"Come on, man," he was like, "Just do your fucking job!  It shouldn't matter how she feels that day."

He then said that it took him 3 years of living in the U.S. to realize he was accustomed to playing these "mind games".

"I didn't even realize they were mind games," he was like.  "That was just how things were."

Two students dropped my class...

...the professor told me the other day, both of the "Brookes".

"Looks like the Brookes dried up," he said.

New Roommate’s New Age Evening Out.

So my one (light-skinned black) friend from Arkansas is temporarily living in my guestroom since her roommate got onto drugs and the situation was bad and I was offering her a place to stay and she was fortunately able to get out of her lease.

Anyways, she participates in a lot of New Age stuff, and she ended up going to a Friday night goddess circle.

“The best part was where we sat silently in a circle and held hands,” she was like, “But the rest was problematic."

When it was announced at the very beginning of the gathering that "Native American goddesses" were being invoked, this on male-to-female transsexual had immediately been like, “What tribe?”,  and when the announcers were flummoxed, she was like, “There’s different tribes and different cultures, you know, they’re not all the same.”

At that, the organizers had hemmed and hawed, but the MTF just cut them off and was like, “I think that your appropriation is very questionable.”

Then, someone said it was okay, giving as the reason, "We’re all a tribe too, the pussy tribe!”

“But I don’t have a pussy,” the MTF was like.

“Yes you do,” someone was like, “Inside.  You’re Two Spirit.”

“I am not Native American,” the MTF was like, “So I am not Two Spirit.”

“And the worst part,” my one (light-skinned black) friend from Arkansas was like, “was that she was sitting right behind me, so everyone kept looking right at me, and I had to either look down and pretend not to be noticing everything or turn my head back and keep looking at her right in the middle of all of this and feel like everyone was staring at me, and the conversation just went on and on and on!”.

Two Great Supportive Texts from Friends on Article Acceptance.

So after I got what seems to be an acceptance on a university presidential pay expose that I’ve been working on forever, I texted a few friends who I had spoken about it with to let them know the good new, and I got these texts back –

1) From a friend from college -

NICE keep me posted

(which I love since I can hear her voice saying that, she writes like she speaks, and I love the difference between the caps and lower case and the lack of punctuation, which suggests genuine excitement) –

2) From a friend from high school –

Yay! Good for u!  Bad for evil prez!;-)

. . .