Stories from the local townie hardware store owner.

The guy who owns the hardware store down the block from me is an old townie guy who's part Polish-American and a retired cop to boot.

The other month I was getting some stuff from him, and he started telling me stories about the old days.

First, he said, guns were always a problem, and G-d help you if you were out at midnight on New Year's Eve in a bad part of town like the neighborhood west of the city where he was always assigned, since people started popping guns and esp. firing at cops.

One year, he said, he and some cops drove down into a basement garage for patrol cars just around midnight, and someone started firing into the walls with semiautomatic weapons.

"Ten minutes or ten minutes after, we'd have been dead," he was like (meaning that if the guy had started firing earlier or later when the patrol car was on the street they would have died?).

He also talked about how the police force used to be a lot tighter.

"Drunks were taken care of back then," he was like, and explained that they were assigned to poorer black neighborhoods (since the police didn't care about those neighborhoods?).

Interestingly, his wife is immigrant Chinese.  He's taught her to make stuffed cabbage, and she's shocked at how much China has taken over from the U.S. for simple manufacturing, since back when she grew up in China, people would kill for American goods, since they thought Chinese-manufactured stuff was shit.

Addendum.

I forgot -

My analysis got some good press and through various people notice of it was tweeted to around 60,000 persons (I'm going to crunch those numbers later, actually; that's just a ballpark estimate).

I wrote that to my one lawyer friend from Missouri, who a few months ago I was telling that I was discouraged at the long publication process, and since then she has been positive and affirming towards me and my project.

She responded:

That's *awesome*, [my name]!

What a great friend.

Responses to my university expose...

After like 9-10 months of research and re-writes, my basic expose of university finances finally got published and went viral at the university and somewhat in higher ed, though it never crossed into general knowledge.

Response from professors was overwhelmingly positive...  My analysis was seen as a constructive and understated presentation of substantive issues, so I think I won a lot more friends than I lost, and since academia is so shaky nowadays, it might help me get my foot in the door to places like interviews, and then people can see I'm not a rabblerouser in person.

Anyhow, since I kind of showed that the university pres and admin were being massively overpaid and were trying to cover it up, I texted a few friends to see what they thought that those people thought after they read it, if they had read it:

1) My one friend who teaches modern Czech literature responded:

Maybe, oh, snap.

 2) My one lawyer friend from Missouri responded:

[...] They probably think you meddle too much.  They're like the Scooby Doo villains.

I esp. love that last text. 

A lot of the admin people are very blatant in their actions in a kind of bungling way, so they are kind of like the Scooby Doo villains!

Many are also scientists and slightly clueless, so they're almost like silly dastardly guys in white lab coats laughing and rubbing their hands in glee at plots that are eventually foiled.

Minor bike accident:

I was riding my bike to school the other day on this wonderfully sunny and breezy mid-morning, and as I was passing by a big vacant lot, lots of dandelion fluff was blowing across the road.

Then, as I was going forward, a big piece of fluff happened right into my path, and before I could do anything, it went right up into my left nostril.

Habits of the British: My two (half Sudanese) (half British) friends.

It’s interesting being around my two (half Sudanese) (half British) friends, since they're some of the only people I've known from  Britain who I've ever been around on a regular basis.

Both talk about very very small things, or notice and linger over the mundane.

I remember like half a year ago, I had a drink with the sister of the 2, and after a serious conversation about her perhaps leaving her job for a better one, she began telling me in detail about an abcess in her ear, and the lengths she had to go to to get it drained.

A few weeks ago, I ran into the brother of the 2 at the gym.

“Look,” he was like, and pointed a finger at a New Yorker cover of gowned graduates standing on broken ice floes like penguins.

Then, he continued to look at it and didn’t say more since he was absorbed by the picture that most other people just glanced at once and then went on with their lives.

We synched up again between sets, and when I went up to chat, he was now somewhere in the magazine, look at it attentively.

“I don’t get it,” he was like, pointing at a cartoon with an obscure caption as he kept looking at it, trying to get it.

 . . .

“They’re like old people,” my one friend from high school who runs an integrated women’s / domestic violence shelter once told me, when I was describing my (British) friends’ habits to her.

Neurotic list-keeping: More lists?

Besides my book list and my re-booted movie list, I’m now starting a “live operas I’ve seen” list, and I may start a “live Classical concerts I’ve seen w/the pieces I’ve heard” list.

3 texts of friend responding to my committee’s making me re-do a dissertation hurdle, which'll make me be in school another 2-3 years:

1)  From my one Indian (dot, not feather) – American friend:

Fuck them

2) From my one professor friend who studies modern Czech literature:

Yay for me!!!

3) From my one comp lit acquaintance from Pittsburgh who graduated after 10+ years in his program:

Keep the aspiddistra flying, sir!