Observations of a Christian book industry worker.

The other week I was at a new bar, this new taproom for a decently established brewery in the city, and the (youngish) (blonde) (kind of bro-ish looking) guy next to me on the bar stool not only turned out to be an off-shift bartender at the place, but also an editor in the Christian book industry.

He said that he wrote, and that he was trying to get more into brewing.

He said that it's hard to reconcile the pastoral and the commercial in that industry, and the way he said it, you could tell that he was just absolutely disgusted, though he really didn't elaborate.

He also said that evangelicalism doesn't contribute to or push forward the wider literary culture at all; it imitates stuff it sees commercially like a year or two after it happens in non-evangelical circles, but it never sets trends, let alone do anything artistically interesting.

I shared with him scholarship that I had read on the deconversion of evangelical artists, and he said it made sense to him, that they grew beyond the tradition.

Furnace and thermostat problems.

Like the other week a month ago or so ago, it was extremely windy for like two days straight, and the wind was coming from a strange direction.

At some point during that time, my furnace stopped working, and when my landlord had his son come over to check it, it turned out that the pilot light had blown out, so he re-lit it.

Ever since then, though, the furnace has been behaving funky.  You turn it on and then it heats for a bit, and then it stops.

I thought that the pilot light went out again, but my landlord came over to check it, and it was still on.

So, he bitched at me and said to turn my thermostat all the way to the left and then to the temp I want, and I did that, and it worked, kind of.

It still doesn't heat straight up to the desired temp like it used to, though, it seems to stop heating a lot randomly at random temperatures below what I set it.

I wonder if there's some problem with the temperature gauge sticking inside of the thermostat.

A Britishcism.

The other week I was having tea ("having tea") with my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair who I'm friends with), and he was like, "In Britain there's a rude word 'gob' for mouth, like 'shut your gob.'"

(The British are always making small talk about inanities, I've noticed, and this was another one.)

"Really?", I was like.

. . .

Later, I realized that that word might be etymologically related to this Britishcism "gabble" that I came across in a tabloid crossword his sister brought me (it's like "yap"), and even later, that it might be related to "goblet."

It's like "thimble" is the small thing on your "thumb," some etymologies become opaque over time, though if you look at them, they're totally there.

Another anecdote of a bank employee.

When I was back in that one local bank to do some banking, I was chit-chatting again with that one bank employee who had helped me set up my account(s).

And, I mentioned that I had lately been to that one really good chili place in the city, that oddly enough also has an ice cream parlor attached.

"Oh," she was like, "I lived there when I was pregnant.  They have everything you want, chili, ice cream, hamburgers..."

My mouse for my laptop broke.

My mouse for my laptop broke.

When I got my new laptop, I made sure to get a retractable cord mouse, versus the battery one...

Why get a cordless mouse and waste all those batteries with their chemicals, when you could just get a corded mouse and it could get its electricity straight from the computer?

Also, the radio waves from the mouse might give you hand cancer, and somehow it doesn't seem like a real mouse, without a cord.

The other week, though, I went to make the cord go draw back, and I accidentally let it go and it snapped back, and as that happened, I knew that I shouldn't have done that, and that the mouse probably broke.

And, it did.

I haven't gotten a new one, though, since I've thought that maybe I could unscrew it and tighten some stuff and maybe get it to work again.

I haven't had the time, though.

Unexpected panhandling situation.

The other month like 6pm when it was already dark out, I was walking down a street with (Asian) businesses, and down the street towards this one strip there were a couple (hispanic) panhandlers.

The first asked for money, and I gave it to him.

The second asked for money in Spanish, and I gave it to him, though when I said something small back in Spanish, he switched to English for me.

Odd contrast, in work directions.

Elder care is wonderful.  I really do like working with dementia patients.  I'm there to help them lead a rich life moment-to-moment, and I can leave work behind as soon as I leave and am not there, since I'm with a good company and everyone I've met who's taking over a shift has extremely good energy, and I'm sure they'd be as skilled and conscientious with the client as I am...

Yet, it's such a strange contrast, in work directions.

Here, I have all this education, and I *do* like teaching, but it has just stopped making sense.

So, I'm with older folks, who I chit-chat with, and who forget what I'm talking about after maybe 20 minutes.

As I told my current writing students, it's such a strong contrast, that work has become so bad, I've chosen not to train young minds, but instead am working with decaying ones.

As I also told them, I'm not judging that one form of work is better than another, it's just that the contrast is striking, that's all.

Threatening behavior on the subway.

The other week I was on the subway during the middle of the day, maybe a bit before noon, and this (cleancut) (very dark-skinned) (young) (black) guy was sitting across from me for much of the ride, me on one side of the car in the middle of the car, and him on the other side of the car in the middle of the car..

About three stops before where I was going, I noticed he's sprawled out just a little bit, and he has a cigarette lit up, and he's just holding it out there and the smoke's getting everyone's attention, and every once in a while he takes a puff.

I looked out of the corner of my eye, and he knew he was imposing on everyone, and it was almost like he wanted someone to challenge him.

Very very odd behavior, very very threatening behavior.  Sometimes that shit happens late at night in major (black) areas, but never in the area where we were, or so early in the day.

You could tell other people were looking at him out of the corner of their eyes, too.

I got up very nonchalantly, stood by a door, and then at the next stop hopped out onto the platform and went into the next car and sat down there.

Flashback to a massive and memorable dump.

The other week, I flashed back to a massive and memorable dump that I took at my one friend from high school's house, on my short weekend trip the other month where I went for a weekend to go see her and her family.

I didn't really shit on the first day of my trip, since I had to get up so early to get on the train, and since I didn't really shit for the rest of that day either, because I had been having so much coffee to keep me awake, that it dehydrated me and must have made shit formation harder down in my bowels.

Then, the next day, I took a *massive* dump in the toilet, before brushing my teeth.

After taking it, I felt like I had to go a little bit more, but I sat there a minute or two with nothing happening, so then I got up to wipe and look at it.

Honestly, it was like a giant red football (from some artificial coloring in wine that we were drinking?), and I was amazed at both its color and its bulk and how cohesive and firm it just looked.

Then, I began brushing my teeth, and about halfway through, I felt like I needed to go to the bathroom again, and I tried to ignore it, but it just kept getting more and more urgent, so I stopped and I set my toothbrush down and I went to go shit again, and it's like a bunch of wet shit pieces just flew out, and when I got up to look, it was like a large bowl of like large shit confetti, since it wasn't loosey-goosey shit that churned up the water, but more like a lot of little discrete pieces that for some reason weren't sticking together, but were all around the same size and floating around the same distance apart for like over half the surface area of the toilet.

At that, I was rather astounded.

First of all, why couldn't I shit that at the same time as the other shit, just a few minutes earlier?

And, how could the two shits be such different consistencies, when they must have been sitting on top of each other in my bowels?!

It really is mind-boggling, and such a memorable shit.

Shaving self-harm.

The other week, I was shaving, and like I usually do, I go get the few stray hairs that I have around each nipple, just to make my chest area look a bit less messier and a bit nicer.

After I did that, I put my shirt back on, and I proceeded to shave my face, only then somehow I felt a slight wetness on the very tip of my left nipple.

That struck me as odd, so I raised my shirt to see if I was bleeding, and I wasn't, but then I looked closer, and a very little bit of the very very tip of my left nipple was nicked, and had a slight red tinge of blood on the subtly gouged out part.

And, I realized that I must have accidentally swiped it, when I was coming up from a shave of the hairs around my nipple.

It's funny, how sensitive nipples are, that I could feel that much just from the shirt resting against such a small wound.

A dream of just the mundane.

The other week, I had a dream of just the mundane (not even the decaying mundane):

I look at my cell phone, and I get a text message from my one friend who's a Romance Language coordinator, and it's something like, "Ok, see you there! :)".

And then, I wake up.

. . .

What's up with these job people?

With my one job with eldercare, I went through a ton of training, and then got no notifications for clients for like 4-5 months, though I had marked out like 4-5 days of availability, including prime weekend times.

Finally, I got one call...

...to work a major holiday.

I said yes, and then a few days later, I got a call to maybe work two days a week on prime weekend times maybe for a couple of months, maybe for longer if the client didn't go away for the winter...

...but they asked me to come in for training on days I didn't have marked as available (?).

So, I may have to cancel work that day at my library job and lose like $80 of income, to come and meet a prospective client and their family.

I guess that's fine, but what's up with these people?  Do they think that a person is completely on call with no life and no other commitments, and is willing to drop everything for maybe two days of work for a couple of months?

The answer, sadly, is yes.

What the f*ck has "work" come to in the U.S.?

There's absolutely no commitment to anyone.

Visit to a Friend from High School (2 of 2): Parrot-sitting.

My one friend from high school is also babysitting her sister's parrot, while her and her husband move houses and get unpacked.

Besides whistling and saying its name, the parrot has now started imitated the beep sound of her "text message received" beep from her phone.

It's so weird and uncanny, to have nature imitate the mechanical.

I found it vaguely malevolent and inauspicious, every time the parrot did that.  It really gave me chills, honestly, and I didn't like it at all.

Visit to a Friend from High School (1 of 2): Her young daughter's sense of humor.

The other month, I took a short weekend trip to visit a friend from high school and her husband and their two young daughters.

Their older daughter is four, and she has a sense of humor where she finds pretend games funny, where people say that something isn't the way that it is.

My friend her mom says that it's the developmental stage, and an outgrowth of play.

So, anyhow, some nights, her mom plays a game with her, and is like, "I'll be so mad if you go brush your teeth right now, don't go brush your teeth, it'll make me angry!"

And, her daughter laughs a ton, and then goes and brushes her teeth.

My friend also said to her, "Whatever you do, don't go help get your sister ready for bed!".

And, her daughter laughed a lot at that, and went and helped her dad get her sister ready for bed.

A comment of a(n Italian) professor I know.

The other weekend I was going out for drinks with this one (young) (Italian) professor I know.

We were catching up and I was talking about my work situation, and kind of out of the blue, she started saying how health care wasn't guaranteed in the U.S., or jobs, and people had to fight and fight and scramble just for work that wasn't enough.

"If it keeps up like this," she was like, "This country will explode."

I then asked her if I had said that to her, since I've been observing that to people here and there for like the past year-and-a-half, and she said, no, it's just something that she's been thinking recently.

. . .

It's not just me.

The Way Memory Works is Weird.

The other week on my one Sunday night radio program, I was listening and doing some word puzzles, and like I so often do, I found myself stopped and just listening to the music, which turned out to be a really good recording of Sibelius's 2nd symphony, as the announcer said when it was all over.

(I had arrived late, and I had turned on the music a bit into it, probably a few minutes after the initial announcement of what the piece was.)

That immediately got me thinking of how much I really liked Sibelius's 5th Symphony when I heard it for the first time earlier that year, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't call to mind how the really moving part went.

Then, like just over a week later, I woke up in the morning, and right away as I was waking up, that part of the music was running through my head, unbidden.

A bit later after I had woken up some, then, I tried to remember it again, but I couldn't, but then later in the day I could.

Was Kind of Shocked, by a Student's Life.

It's been interesting to be around the city's community colleges.

One of my students is a really nice (young) (black) guy, who works in his church and whose mom sometimes calls him on the phone.

At one of our recent tutoring sessions, he was super distracted, and he had his phone out on the table and was checking it a lot, and then he excused himself to go take a phone call from his mom.

When he came back, he said that the light bill was due later that day, and they were trying to figure out what to do.

Later, he got a text and he said it was all okay, because a neighbor was helping them cover it.

. . .

Dream of a thing on my face.

The other week, I dreamnt -

I look in the mirror, and I notice that somehow I didn't shave this thing growing out of my face just below the lower righthand corner of my lip, and there's a clump of rather long hairs around and under it.

. . .

Students can be so different, it's funny.

Students can be so different, it's funny.

My mom sent me this article on John Grisham's new thriller, since it's based on for-profit law schools defrauding people.

One student who I tutor got into the article when I set up an exercise around it for him to do, so I decided to use it again the next day, for a different bunch of students.

The first one turned out to *hate* it, and she told me that though she gets into stories and poems, whenever it's something non-fiction, esp. about a person's life, she just tunes out while reading and ends up staring out into space and she really has to force herself to read it, and she often has to read it again a second time, since she didn't engage all that much the first time around.

Then, funnily enough, with the next student that day, she was like, "Thanks so much for this!", and she said she absolutely *hated* the exercise we had done around pop song lyrics, the previous week.

"It just is so much better, when it ties into the real world," she was like.

Like I said, students can be so different, it's funny.

A happening on a trip to the store, the other day.

The other Sunday evening when I was walking to the store, I was walking up the main stretch, and all of a sudden people spill out of a Korean BBQ as I walk by and then some people spill out of the Chinese restaurant a few doors up, and then I notice that they're not customers leaving, but rather people just milling about out front, and I notice that though I can see them, it's because the streetlights across the street are on, but the ones on our side of the street are out, and the storefronts are dark.

"Did the power go out?", I ask a (young) (Chinese) woman who's on her cell and has an apron on and is spilling out onto the sidewalk.

"Yes!", she's like.  "Two or three minutes ago."

As I walk up that block a bit further, I can see the mini-mall to my right is also all dark, and there's a single white emergency light intermittently flashing in the chain pharmacy.

After I did my shopping further up, then, I was walking home, and I noticed the lights in the mini-mall were back on, and so I glanced further up the street and I could see the Chinese restaurant sign all lit up.

The power must have gotten back on, within thirty minutes.

A dream of campaigning.

The other week, I dreamnt:

I have my Yahoo! email account open, and someone's depositing money into my campaign bank account, and as I watch three receipt emails pop up as the most recent emails in my inbox, and I get nervous since they're my first donations and I don't have the state electronic software down yet, to record them, and I start to very mildly worry because I only have so many days to do that, and I'm not sure that when I enter them I'll do it right.

. . .

When I wake up, I'm impressed by how realistic the receipt emails looked, in my dream; they looked exactly like you'd expect email receipts showing up in your Yahoo! account to look like.

A bus trip on a rainy Saturday.

The other Saturday, I took a bus ride to an enrichment class on a rainy morning.

After getting on the bus near my house, we kept going north, since it was a straight shot to where I needed to go, but like a third of the way right before we got there, the bus driver slowed down and gave an announcement over the intercom, that because of a flooded area beneath a viaduct, we would turn off a few streets before, go over a few blocks, go up a few blocks, go over back a few blocks, and then continue our route.

And, we did that.

As we were going to turn back onto our route, a (younger) (white) woman walked up to the driver, and asked if he was going to go left first, to cover some of the sections he missed, that were cut off by our route.

He said "No," and so she got off at the next stop.

Overheard conversation at a (repeat) bar...

...that I went back to in a rich neighborhood, since the name for the downstairs bar changed to something different than the upstairs restaurant (though I vaguely remember maybe stopping through the downstairs bar as well before, for the name change, maybe):

A(n early 40s) (white) (female) rich person, to a vaguely similar guy:  [something something, something] "no, I haven't been to Amalfi yet, last time I was in Italy I went to [something something, something]

. . .

...it was like some sort of "in the know" thing, where people talked of a certain set of places where everybody went to in Italy... so weird...

Bob Seger and white nationalism.

It was super funky going to a Bob Seger concert.

Because I bought my ticket later than my friend, we sat in different sections, so before the concert started, I kept myself occupied by trying to spot someone in the stadium who didn't look white.

I couldn't find anyone like that, though I kept through faces in the crowd for like 5-8 minutes.

The whole thing was really trippy, and it seemed to dovetail into white nationalism.

Before the concert, I was noticing how a lot of the t-shirts at the merchandise booth had bald eagles and flags on them.

Also, the lyrics!

"Old Time Rock and Roll" is anti-disco (read: anti-queer and anti-brown and black) ("Don't try to take me to a disco"), and the whole conception of rock and roll seems whitewashed and disconnected from much of its roots (e.g. that Ike Turner song that supposedly was the first rock-and-roll song ever).

Also, it seems very "I'm this way and I know everything," like an in-your-face know-it-all Texan (it's almost like, "Just go and dare to try and take me to a disco").

After the concert, too, I was reading through the lyrics of "Like a Rock," and the whole thing was quasi-fascistic, with its idolization of young muscular bodies and a nostalgic commonsense morality where you just instinctually knew what's right, not to mention its romanticizing "working for peanuts" (which feeds into blaming immigrants for low wages, rather than the bossman?).

Very, very odd.

It seems that the seeds of white nationalism have been latent in our culture for a long time, just sitting there, gestating.

I really need to get to know Bruce Springsteen's work more, and see how he treats similar shit from white culture.

A new barbershop in my neighborhood.

So, I switched barbers after like a decade.

Rather than going to my standard salon near my old university, I decided to find a new place, since my good stylist left and I couldn't make the discount days, and plus on the days that I *could* make due to my work schedule, they started not having any men's hair stylists on shift.

So, the other Saturday when I was home, I googled barbers in my neighborhood, and I found a place like five blocks north of me that's tucked away on a side street and has been around a long time, and that people really like and speak highly of.

The name is basically two stereotypically Italian male nicknames, and when I get there, there's photos on the wall of stills from "Raging Bull" and the "Godfather," and a big picture of Elvis (?), and a huge poster of some Italian soccer team from some year back years ago that won the World Cup.

Overall, it was otherwise just normal, and very pleasant.

I read a magazine for a bit, then I got in as a walk-in, and on my way out I took a small styrofoam cup of coffee for the road, as well as a small bit of coffee cake that they had cut up in small squares and out on a paper towel on a small tray next to the coffee maker.

It was like a lazy Saturday afternoon, with all the time in the world.

I need to get back to that mentality.

Anecdote of a bank employee...:

The other month when I was at a local bank on a Saturday morning setting up an account, I was chit-chatting with the one (hispanic) (female) teller I had been working with, and after she was saying that I looked tired (which I was!), she mentioned that she used to work at a branch up near a major party college in a different part of the city.

"Saturday morning was a trip," she was like.

She said it'd usually be a bunch of college kids, a lot of times girls in their pajamas, coming in to cancel their credit and debit cards, since they didn't have them and weren't really sure where they were.

"I think they still have it?", was like stuff they used to say.

Image from a Dream:

The other week I dreamnt -

I'm looking at (a white) someone's hands, I think a woman's, and they have bits of corn silk cut into a small pile of neatly-cut pieces like 2-inches long, and as I hear them saying that I should be saving the corn silk for this, I look at a needle lying out on their upturned right palm, and then they start showing me how they bundle the corn silk together to thread the needle.

. . .

Community College Tutoring (2 of 2): Professor Flux.

So, way back at the beginning of term, my one student at one community college said that it had taken a couple weeks for them to get a professor for her remedial comp class.

Now, the professor dropped out, just after midterms, so the school is having a fill-in for a couple sessions until they can find a new one.

I find that just sick.

Pay is so low and there's so little commitment to employees, there's a revolving door of professors even during the term, and the students suffer.

It shouldn't have to be like this.

On the other hand, my student said that she was learning more from working an hour a week with me than from the six hours weekly in class, so that was a very satisfying teaching moment.

Community College Tutoring (1 of 2): Reaction to Difficult Material.

The other week when I was tutoring at the one community college where I work at, the student who I'm working on research papers with had a week with no homework, so we did this "analyze song lyrics" bonus session, to practice brainstorming and paper analysis skills, so she could continue learning, even apart from class material.

But, as it turns out, she hadn't worked on a literature paper in forever, and couldn't even really remember how that worked in high school from a few years ago, so she balked.

In fact, after hitting her first road block, she was like, "Do you have a poem or something?, I don't get this."

I found that a very interesting reaction that I'd never seen in a student before, the impulse to abandon a project rather than grapple with it.

My hunch is, is that this particular student wants to be in control of all material, so she'd rather give up on a project than face an uncertain feeling of being challenged and not knowing where her thoughts are going.

In fact, I noticed that in her brainstorming outline, she wanted to exclude what didn't belong in the categories that she set up, rather than reason through it.

Very, very interesting.  I sure am learning a lot, pedagogically!

Generosity by an Iraqi woman.

The other week, I was far away in a different part of the city than I usually am, and since there's a lot of (middle easterners) in the neighborhood, I stopped to have kebabs, and then popped into an ethnic food shop to browse.

After I picked out some fig jam as a gift for my one (half Sudanese) (half British) friend (the brother of the sister pair; the brother has a sweet tooth), for the next time he has me over for dinner, I noticed that one vegetable jar in the half-off section had a loose cap, so I took that up to the (young middle-aged) (middle eastern) counterwoman.

She thanked me a lot, and then when I asked her about brands of fig jam, she recommended that I go with another one, since the kind I got was too thick and it was just too sweet.

So, she took me back over into the aisle I had been in and showed me the better brand, and then she said that it went really well with this cream, which interested me, though I said that I wouldn't be buying it since my friend is vegan and the jam was for him.

First, she said, "Nice gift!".

Then, she said, "Here, try some cream," and went to the refrigerator to pull some out.

"Oh no, you don't have to do that!", I was like.

"No, please," she was like.  "I need some for home, I'll open it here, you can try some."

It was like a cream cheese, but less sweet and a bit richer.

"Thanks a lot!", I was like.

"Isn't it good?", she was like.  "It's great with the jam."

As I checked out, then, we introduced ourselves.

She's originally from Iraq.

Unexpectedly nice part of one of my part-time jobs.

It feels so much more real, to be in the main building and the library of a community college.

The students look like real people, as opposed to the kids that I usually teach at my (elite) college.

It's very, very comfortable, and I like it.

A dream of Boston.

The other week, I dreamnt -

I was looking at a picture on Facebook, and a friend had something like a livestream photo, looking upwards between glass skyscrapers in Boston's financial district, and way high up there was a glass-encased skyway connecting buildings, and beyond that, the sky; no streets or trees were visible.

I realized, too, when I looked at the photo, that this was somewhere near the 32nd street subway stop.

. . .

Midwest dialectic item.

I've noticed that I put a lot of one-syllable past participles into forms with an "-en" on the end, like "boughten" or "caughten" (which I'm assuming morphologically levels them to be like "gotten"?).

The other month, I was talking with a (college-age) (Mexican-American) guy, who was born and raised in Chicago.

He said, "I should have broughten a phone charger."

...! ! !...

My apartment's still not clean.

Somehow I thought that after getting my dissertation done, I'd easily find time to clean my apartment top-to-bottom.

Instead, I haven't.

With catching up with friends, I haven't found time.

Between juggling 3-4 jobs, I haven't found time.

With campaign duties, I haven't found time.

Then, on top of all of that, campaign duties tire me out, so when I *do* have time, I'm usually too tired!

It'll get done at some point, though.

"Prioritize."

Observation of a (Sicilian) doctoral student on my family biography...

...when I told her my father's immigration story, the ethnic history of my mom's family, etc.:

"How complicated."

She then said that she always thinks that whenever she hears American biographies, because with her own family, everyone was always from Sicily on both sides.

She said, too, that everyone in her family wasn't very educated until very recently, and that the older women in her family couldn't even sign their own names.

Bicycling sight, of another bicyclist.

The other week I was biking into work on my morning commute, and I see a (very old) (Chinese) man without a helmet on, slowly biking in a slightly wobbly line.

As I pass him, I hear a child's voice, so I turn my head, and he has a little girl sitting across the handlebars, and he's biking both of them along and talking to her at the same time.

Comment of a fellow canvasser: Tamales.

This one (college age) (Mexican-American) guy, as we were leaving the building where canvassers were gathering and he whipped out and left a grease-stained bag on a table in the foyer, so that they were kind of hiding behind a sign:

"I brought some tamales for later."

Then: 

"I'm just gonna leave them chillin' right there, till we get back."

A dream of flesh wounds.

The other week I dreamt -

I had a scab somewhere regular on my body, like maybe my arm, and that made me remember that I had a scab on my left heel, as well.

So, I turn up my foot, and it's really more than a scab, and more like a cratered-in wound in my flesh that's like the size of a pebble, and though it's still oozing around the sides, there's this part of mixed scab and fresh blood in the middle, trying to coagulate, though it's mostly not, really.

I see that and think that that's not a regular scab, and I have a slight fear that it might turn into something worse, if it keeps on its course..

. . .

Flashback to high school.

Whenever I bike in in the morning to the one community college that I tutor at, I always have to bike on the sidewalk for the last little bit, since the way that the one-way streets run in that part of town, it's tough to use bikelanes to get there, for the last little stretch of it.

The past few weeks, there's been a car or a van parked right in front of the little ramp that runs down from the sidewalk and interrupts the curb, so I haven't been able to bike down using the ramp, but instead have had to stop and lift my bike down, then get on it again and bike on over across the street.

Each time when this has happened, it's brought me back to high school, and my one friend whose brother had cerebral palsy and had to use a wheelchair.

I remember one time when we were together in a car somewhere for some reason - I think she gave me a ride somewhere for something we both had to go to? - and she got so angry because someone had parked right in front of a ramp.

"That makes it so hard for other people!', she said.

She was really really angry out of otherwise nowhere, I remember, and that was the first time I think I really caught a glimpse of how different people's lives could be even though we lived in the same world, if they had something like a disability.

Odd beach sight.

The other week when it was a beautiful weekend afternoon, I was at a park beach like I usually am, since I try to get out to the beach once a week when the weather is nice.

And, people were swimming, and I had been swimming myself earlier that afternoon.

And, all of a sudden, there was this (mildly confused looking) (older) (white) man with a (moustache) yelling down at swimmers, saying that he was a cop and that they were swimming in an illegal place and to get out, and that didn't they know there was an undertow and 39 people died this summer from it, and that cops would come there but they were busy with an event, and he'd be calling them (and he did go on to actually do that, since no-one was paying attention to him!).

The whole thing didn't make much sense, since that part about the undertow seems like crap, and he probably wasn't a cop either, too, but rather just some older guy with dementia or maybe mental problems.

I watched him a bit and then tried to keep an eye out for him, out of the corner of my eye.

To be perfectly frank, I was wondering if he was a wacko armed white guy, like that one shooter guy in Las Vegas, and I was trying to be on top of shit in case he had a gun.

This gun availability thing is fucking nuts.

Comment of a banker.

The other week I went back a second time to a local bank, to finally open up the initial account for my campaign.

"So how you been?", said the same (middle middle-aged) (Latina) account clerk who helped me before when I had been checking into initial details and requirements.

"Good," I was like, "But tired."

I then explained that I was out at an art opening for over 4 hours the previous night, and though I thrive on stuff like that, I find myself tired a lot, and I had actually slept through my alarm that morning until ten-thirty, though I had been hoping to get up to nine-thirty.

"I'm just so tired all the time since I began this campaign," I was like.

"It's like a parent with a new baby," she was like.

Then, she was like, "You just gave birth to a campaign."

Odd injury.

The other week I noticed that I had like a little deflated flesh bubble of skin about the size of half a dime just above the lower big knuckle on my righthand thumb.

It's almost like I had a blister there somehow (?), and it got popped and that's what was left.

I peeled the skin off, and it left a pink patch of skin that's becoming hardened, though sometimes I notice it has clear just barely yellowing juices coming out of the top, from where my thumb moved and broke the slight hardening scab and made it all juicy and infectable again.

"People sure are different."

I'm surprised by the number of acquaintances who say "Not now" and "Talk to me later" when I ask them for campaign donations.

Don't they know how much I'm running around, and how much time and effort it takes me to chase them down?

I bumped into someone the other day on a Sunday, and she was like, "Let's talk later, not in the park!".

I mean, it's like, C'mon, I'm just asking you for a verbal pledge, that takes a sentence to speak, too.

As my dad said to me years ago as one of his 2 big life lessons, "People sure are different."

A classroom idea I won't do.

The other week I was thinking, that when I teach college writing, I make my students roll dice, and for the rest of the term I teach them as I normally do, only I never use their names at all, but just call them shit like "Student #43" instead.

It'd be a burlesque on the corporatized university...  Get it?

I'm so precarious that I don't want to cause any trouble, though.

I checked in with my one professor friend who teaches (modern) (Czech) literature and she actually loved the idea, and only just suggested that I call them things like "Profit Center #43" instead.

A morning of two oddities:

One morning the other week before my tutoring job, somehow my slice of toast I was munching fell out of my hand as I went to go get the coffee percolator, and it flew a bit and landed over on the floor to the left of the stove, butter side down.

A bit later as I was biking up towards the subway stop, there were a bunch of firefighters parked by the side of a residential street, and as I passed by, one guy was turning some giant wooden lever thing on top of a fire hydrant, and he was unscrewing it as a few others watched, and as I biked right past them, spurts of rusty water were like spurting out onto the street by the curb, and then washing over in a thinner sheet to where my bike tires were just then going by.

Both things happened, on the same morning.

Mutual woo-ing?

So, I'm thinking of unionizing my one tutoring job at a non-profit, since it really is like "Uber for adjuncts," though I do like the students.

Already I made sure to get names and emails, and I've created a list for the entire bargaining unit.

I also went out for coffee with one guy the other day (a European immigrant who worked for a franchise, and actually left the franchise since he didn't like how U.S. labor law protects employers and his company made him cut hours and increase precarity to the point where employees were crying on him, "there has to be a balance, and here it's too far one way," he was like).

I also hit up another tutor the other day, when I bumped into him in the college library, and I mentioned getting together for coffee, and he also said that he liked the job, but "there's not enough hours," at which point I grimaced in sympathy.

When I went to email him from the list, then, I googled him to try to kick up a photo to see if I was writing the right person, and what do I find out, but that he's a long-time labor activist and actually did stuff like being a steward and bargainer and shit.

That got me wondering, was his side comment about lack of hours actually him trying to feel me out for a unionization drive?

We might have been wooing each other!

LOL.

Me, to a (black-sounding) phone survey woman the other week...

...who asked me if I supported a "managed lane" where people could pay more to use it, above and beyond the conversion of a local highway to a tollroad:

"Heck no!  I don't think people with more money should be able to buy their way into better treatment than any of the rest of us."

. . .

(Then when she sounded amused and said something like, "Thank you," I was like, "Sorry, but I'm feisty like that.")

A classroom trick I'll never do.

This year, I've thought that on my long days of teaching, as a burlesque on overworked teachers stretched thin between multiple jobs, that at the start of each new back-to-back class, I'd take out a pocket mirror, tap some sugar on it, roll up a dollar bill, and snort it, and be like, "Aaaah!", and then begin teaching.

I'd never actually do that, though.

I think.

An Agatha Christie surprise.

The other week a book I had requested wasn't in yet at my local public library branch, and I'd been thinking of reading a mystery since my one (lawyer) friend from (Missouri) is always reading one and is always talking about them, so I checked out which Agatha Christie books they had, to see if I should get one.

One was part of the Poirot series, and it didn't seem like it made much sense for me to start off on a series, but the other one they had was called "Pale Horse" and seemed to be a stand-alone, so I got that one.

As it turns out, it starts out with a catfight between slumming heiresses, and it eventually gets into the mid-20th c. English occult revival and bastardized Freudianism!

As they say, that's kismet.

Good choice, me.

A mildly disturbing moment with a tutoree.

The other week during a tutoring session at a community college, one of my (young) (Latina) tutorees talked herself down, and said out loud in response to something we were doing, "That's because I'm so stupid."

In all my years of teaching across (elite) schools, I've never had a student say that before.

I was decently disturbed, and wondered where she'd learn to think that about herself, not to mention verbalize it.

I didn't say anything, but was especially conscientious about affirming good work throughout the rest of the session.

She really is a good student to have and work with, and does good work each session, and improves across sessions!

Some Jewish wisdom someone put on Facebook.

Someone I know who studies Judaism put up on Facebook that she came across some Jewish wisdom, to consider each habit and only retain those that you'd take a vow to do.

She said that she realized that social media was a chain, and she would never vow to become attached to it like she has become.

In the comments section, everyone went nuts, since they liked both the wisdom and her application of it.

It's made me think twice, about how much I'm on Facebook and Twitter.

My big idea for my campaign.

So, since it's permissible to take up to $250 in a cash donation, and since a receipt from a receipt book would count as a transaction record, I'm going to have to get a receipt book and always carry it with me in my back pocket.

That way if I bump into someone and they have some cash on them and they want to pledge me, I can whip it out, write down the necessary info, have them sign/date the receipt with the listed amount, and take the cash right then and there, one-two-three lickety-split, all neat and clean and legal.

That'll really help me with small donors, I think.

It'll also be fun.

Two jokes, with one of my (half British) (half Sudanese) friends.

The other week I met my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair) for drinks downtown, during a weekday happy hour.

She was telling me about her day in court, and then she made a side observation that a lot of people think she's always the bad guy in cases for the city, and that she's just out to fine people.

"That's too bad," I was like.

Then, I was like, "Next time someone says that, you should be all like, 'Fine? FINE?! Yes I am but no I don't!!" (*snapsnapsnap*).

She liked that.

I also joked what a high-powered fearsome lawyer she was becoming, after my knowing her back in the day when she was living in a studio and going to law school and then studying for the bar.

So, I put on a dramatic TV reading voice and was all like, "Ms. [her first name] [her last name], Esquire.  If you see her in court, she'll have you for dinner.  Actually, she'll have you for tea, you're not even a full meal to her..."

"I quite like that," she was like.  "Do you mind if I steal it?"

Post-concert uber-waiting.

The other month after a stadium concert in the 'burbs, me and a friend were waiting in the Uber line, and we had talked with this (white) (middle-aged wife and older husband) couple from Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and we had all agreed to split a ride back downtown, so we were all waiting there, amidst this line of people all waiting for Ubers and taxis and whatnot, so they could get back to wherever they were going.

Right before our ride got there, this (young) (blonde) (white) guy was chit-chatting to the U.P. wife, as she was sitting by the curb.

He seemed really drunk, and she kept laughing.

Once we were in the Uber, she started talking about how drunk that guy was.

"That woman there was his mom," she was like, "And he kept being like, 'This is my mom, she's seventy-one but has nice tits, she should use them to get us a ride.  Mom, open up and let 'em fly!'".

She also said that the other woman was his fiancée.

"Poor thing," she was like.  "They've been engaged four years.  He says, 'I believe in engagement, I don't believe in marriage, I get sex that way!'".

The U.P. wife thought he was the funniest thing in the world.

"Where's he from?", I was like.

"Canada," she said.

Neighborhood hijinks.

The other week at a community meeting, I was talking with a (middle-aged) (redheaded) woman who lives near the library, since she happened to be sitting next to me.

"You mean on that side street by the fountain?", I was like.  "I like that street a lot!  I always used to walk down it back in the day when I had my other apartment, since it's right on my route to the library."

"Yeah," she was like. "It's great, though sometimes the drunk men can be a lot."

"Really?", I was like.  "I've chitchatted with them a few times, they seem nice."

"They are," she was like, "But then they go and pull shit like throwing detergent in the fountain so it bubbles."

"I've never seen that," I was like.

At that, she was surprised.

"That's odd," she was like.  "They do it a lot."

On Detroit (3 of 3): Out in the neighborhoods.

The last thing about Detroit is, is that out in the neighborhoods, it's not just that there's so many empty lots, but also that there's lots of big trees and mounds of bushes and vines, so it's really more like the countryside, with a house here and there and much greenery in between.

It's just become a new type of landscape, one that you don't expect and that I'm not sure you really see anywhere else.

On Detroit (2 of 3): Downtown, and elsewhere.

The thing about Detroit is that the city center is just popping and vibrant, renovations everywhere.

Then, there might be some in-between strips.

Then, it's just out in the vacant land of the neighborhoods, just five minutes away from downtown.

It's like another planet.

It's really like, tourists and nice apartments there downtown, and then there's everyone else, and some of them might come in to do raunchy clubbing in the evenings, but they don't really live there and they don't really belong there.

How weird.

On Detroit (1 of 3): Seediness.

Downtown Detroit's a bit seedy.

For one, cab drivers try to cheat you, and have broken fare monitors on their dashboards.

When I was leaving one bar after last call, too, there was just this (older middle-aged) (pretty thin) (black) guy in a t-shirt sitting out on a bench with a shopping bag on each side as I turned the corner to go back to my hostel, and he was like, "Hey, my man, I got a bottle of tequila here for thirty dollars that I'm trying to get rid of."

Near one tourist site out in the neighborhoods, too, there was a woman selling water and Gatorade off her front porch.

Much of it is lack of work, but that cabdriver stuff and even a bit of that tequila selling stuff starts moving towards seediness.  Something seems just a little bit dark and weird and vaguely trashy about it, like you don't know who the people are and why they need the money, and they seem to be characters full of quirks and tics.

A stray thought on labor reform.

I find it really, really inspiring that Irish politicians are taking on precarity by seeking to provide legal oversight of "worker on demand" jobs.

For like the past six-to-eight months, I've been saying that we need better laws, and then Ireland is right out there doing it.

It's also a nice talking point for labor campaigns, like, "An EU country is trying to ban working conditions like your employer is trying to defend at all costs."

The only thing is, though, is that I can't remember the prime minister's name.  I always call him something like "that gay Indian prime minister guy in Ireland," or I fuck up his last name and am like, "Leo Eckankar."

Memories of the Friday night of Halloween weekend:

After a concert, my one (Spanish) professor friend texts me, that he's out at a Halloween party in my neighborhood, so after I stop through home, I walk over there, only to find that the doors had *just* closed.

So, since he's not responding to texts and whatnot, I decide just to wait around outside, to see if he's in there, and after a bit I notice I can look in through one storefront window, so I do and I think I see him, so I wait, and then finally he comes out with his girlfriend and this other (Spanish) couple that I know, and he has a green tail and this green thing on his head, as does his (Spanish) (male) friend who I've met.

"Are we dinosaurs, or dragons?!", he asks me a bit bombastically and a bit confrontationally like right a way, also a bit drunkenly, too.

"Dragons," I was like.

"See, see!", he was like, tapping his friend's chest.  "This man knows what he's talking about!".

Then, I suggest a nightcap, only they want tacos, so we all started to head over to the local taqueria.

My friend and his friend were a bit ahead of me, and were joking.

"Dragons don't buy tacos!", they were like. "We go and eat them, ROOAAAARRRR...".

Then, they were like, "We make tacos, we roast the meat for them, AASHHSAHASHASAHA," they were like, making a hissing sound like spitting fire.

At that point, I was alongside of them and by the door to the taqueria, so I pulled it open for them.

"Dragons first," I was like, "Then ladies," and then they walked in, and then their girlfriends straggled in behind them, laughing at my joke.

"Dragons first!", one was like, laughing.

Over the meal, we talked about how fucked up the situation was with Catalonia.

Puerto Rico devastation, in retrospect.

Right before the senators released a statement demanding more aid to Puerto Rico, I was getting really, really disturbed and pissed off by the inattention to the island, and was thinking of calling the White House to demand that something be done.

Then, I saw the story of that senatorial statement, and didn't.

In retrospect, I should have called, since it was the only thing that was in my power to do, so I should have done it.

I did do it like a week later, but by then the response was bungled up, and it was too late.

A pre-Halloween sight...

...at my local bank:

A cheap print-out taped to the door, reminding people not to wear masks inside, and, "Happy Halloween!".

Comment of 2 people outside a taqueria in my neighborhood at like 2am on a Tuesday.

The (middle-aged) (black) woman of the (black) couple, as they're walking to their car:

"Smells like rain."

A sight biking in to work the other day at lunchtime...

...as I was going down my typical boulevard:

Like 6-8 police cars in the parking spaces and the righthand lane, and a cop standing out in the lefthand lane, and groups of people here and there on the sidewalk before and after the cops, and some red tape with black lettering, stretching across many trees by the sidewalk, saying "CRIME SCENE."

. . .

I couldn't see anything as I slowly biked by, and I wasn't sure what was up.

A library sight the other week:

Two very thin almost like fiberboard wall sidings, just laying on the floor on a side aisle.

I stopped and had to look close, to see if they were part of the tile, or were just laying on them, and when you walked on them like I did after I checked them out, you really didn't notice much of a difference in what you were walking on.

After I noticed them, too, I wondered how they got there.

I also thought that with that I was a lot like an Alzheimer's patient, since due to loss of thinking skills they often stop when tiles become carpet or a carpet becomes tile, since they see a difference between the materials but can't process exactly what's happening, a lot of times.

So, I like my tutoring job.

So, I finally started my tutoring job helping local community college students.

I only got three students, but all are smart and engaged, and in all of our very first sessions I was able to help them a lot.

Two are Mexican heritage, and when I was chit-chatting with one, she mentioned that she used to work streetfairs doing fruit and corn at her family's food booth!

I got very energized from interacting with them, but I wish the job gave me more hours, and was more permanent.

It's for stuff like this that I got into education.

It really is too bad; the entire higher education system just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  How sad.

Two Wisconsin sights, of young workers.

The other weekend I was in Wisconsin for a friend's birthday party.

While there, I hit up a jam shop.

The worker was a (young) (white) (female), and when I came in she was just leaning back against a pie-making table with her arms crossed, just staring out into space and looking bored.

The shop was otherwise empty, and she seemed to have been doing that for a while, and she wasn't on her phone or anything, but was just staring out into space.

Later, at a hotdog place, there was this (skinny) (white) (female) teenage worker with two tightly braided reddish-brown pigtails, and they were on either side of her head under a fastfood brim cap, and her shirt was a bit big and her sleeves hung off her thin arms, and she was just running around frantically in the small kitchen place behind the register and frying fries and prepping hotdogs, and she seemed so exasperated.

Landlord brusqueness.

The other Sunday night at like 9pm, I had gotten back from the beach and was heading out to go to the grocery store before it closed at 10pm, and for the first time ever in my life, I accidentally locked myself out of my apartment.

So, I called my landlord, and he was *pissed*, and he said something about how everyone else was locking themselves out lately, and he should start charging $25 for it, and when he came over I said I was sorry, but he said that he didn't want to hear about it.

Anyhow, the next day he called me when I was at work, but I didn't pick up and he left no message.

On Tuesday, the same thing, and afterwards he texted to call him.

So, I said something about how I was starting a new job, and would call during a break, and I called him later.

He said to get keys made and hide them so it wouldn't happen again, and then he was very apologetic and said that he had gone to bed early and I had woken him up, so that if he said anything, he was half-asleep and didn't mean it.

I felt so relieved afterwards; I was actually worried that he was still pissed at me.

The state of work nowadays.

The other week when I was at a new bar, a lounge in a new theater complex, I ended up talking with the (white) (male) bartender and one of his (white) (male) friends who was sitting there, with a (white) woman he was dating.

Both of the guys had done MFA degrees and were saying that even despite that, it was hard to find steady work, and the one friend said that he's from Wisconsin, and older generations he knows just don't get it, and even if they recognize the problem, from stuff they say you can tell they really just don't get how it actually plays out on the ground-level, since they've never lived it.

"Like when my one part-time job gave me 3 hours instead of 10, my mom said I should have looked out for signals more that they were undependable, so I wouldn't make that same mistake in the future," I was like.  "But, that's assuming that I have a selection of jobs, and that part-time job and another one was the best I could come up with, after a year of applying for jobs."

"Yeah, like that," he was like, and he grimaced.

The bartender said that he's originally from Florida, and a friend of his has a good tech system degree, and couldn't find work in Florida, so he moved to our city.

"It's been two to three months, and still no job," he was like.  "And he has a good field and a good degree."

I didn't say anything, but that got me thinking that people have told me to move to find work, but that means you go to a new place where you have no social networks, so it's not like that's better.

Our economy is so fucked right now.

Campaign observations:

1) My fight against higher education corruption is very appealing to people, since they think the student crisis is whack, and I've been calling out the right people.

2) Going to a lot of community events can be tiring, after a long day at work... I had Tues. / Wed. / Thurs. evening events one week (and I went to a concert Mon. night!), and I got so tired by Wed. that I ended up cancelling a day of work at my library job on Thurs., so I could rest and be fresh... 

Most weeks aren't like that, but I'm going to have to get very disciplined and regimented, if I want to be a serious candidate.

A dream of an object:

The other week, I dreamnt -

I have a large glass bottle in my hand, about the size of a soda water bottle, and it's a bit dingy with sand here and there on the interior, since it has a bunch of round stones in it.

There's also a large-ish broken area on the side, and the glass from the broken area is there amongst the stones.  I can see some dirty white plastic bottle caps at the bottom, and I'm carefully reaching in through the broken gap to try to work them out and remove them.

"People say this is natural," someone I can't see says to me.

. . .

Sight on my commute in the other day:

A car slowly edging up the street in the bikelane, going the wrong way on a boulevard.

As I pass, there's a(n old) (black) lady in turquoise sitting in there and looking to her left, like she's going to do a U-turn and get into a parking space.

She doesn't seem disoriented, per se, but more like she made the wrong choice, and should have been backing up to do what she wanted to do, rather than drive the wrong way down a one-way street.

Sights at a New Age fair the other weekend:

1) At a pyramid power booth, a (fat) (slow-eyed) (hispanic) man sitting underneath a pyramid made of metal pipes, next to a sign that says "$20 for 10 minutes."

2) At that same pyramid power booth, a (thin) (Asian) woman lying on a small bed with a thin mattress, in the midst of a frame that goes over her and forms a shelf on which pyramids of various sizes are laid end-to-end, all over her about a foot from her body.

3) Behind a row of vending booths, a man standing in the middle of a metal bowl that's about two feet across and a foot or two high, and another man whacks a long metal pipe against it and sets a low tone off, and then slowly moves the ringing long metal pipe around all over his body, just a bit over it, here and there in broad swipes, all very slowly, all over his body, just a bit over it.

4) As I pass by a booth that has a "TOE READING" sign out front, two young women pass by, and one says rather nonchalantly but still quite seriously, "Toe-reading, I've never seen that before."

5) As I walk past the area of the grounds with a labyrinth, there's all these people pacing very slowly and looking very seriously at the ground beneath their steps, and occasionally people bump into each other, and they look up and look confused and like they're not quite sure what to do, and two people are walking by me, and one is like to the other, "I think they laid that out wrong," and the other agrees...

A sight on my bikeride into work the other week:

As I cross the highway and get down onto the other side, over in the tall dead trash-filled weeds by a bus stop by the viaduct, a(n old) (Chinese) man in a floppy white hat with his back to the street is looking up at a(n old) (Chinese) woman in a floppy white hat sitting on some forlorn concrete steps that for some reason are in the tall dead trash-filled weeds, and I think to myself that they're waiting for the bus there, and that they're the only ones there, and also that I never noticed the steps or the weeds or the trash at all ever before.

Compliments from some neighbors.

The other week on a Sunday I was sitting out on a chair on my stoop and reading a book, and every once in a while people would walk by, sometimes with a dog, and say hi.

At one point, a (white) couple in their early 30s strolled by with their dog, and the woman was like, "Is that your sign?", pointing to my "UNIONS ARE THE SOLUTION FOR A RIGGED ECONOMY" sign taped up in my window.

"Yes," I was like, "I got it at the march downtown on Labor Day."

"I like it," she was like.

It really is like the gum that you like, is coming back into style.

You know how I know when fall truly hits, every single effing year?

One day it's sunny out but a bit cooler, and I'm biking on my usual routes like I usually do, and suddenly it's just like one bad driver after another after another, like all of a sudden everywhere you look no-one is looking out for bikes any more.

Then, I know it's fall.

Lemons to lemonade.

You know what's helped me deal with my endlessly precarious work situation?

Reframing that as worthwhile experience, that helps me understand what people are going through, and which make my efforts at unionization and social change all the more impressive, since I did them despite my endlessly precarious, time-sucking work for shit wages.

It really is a biography for today, that people respect.  In a way, without knowing it, I developed integrity and a narrative.

"Who woulda thunk."

A dream the other week, of musicians.

The other week I dreamnt -

I'm in a diner, and at the stool by the end slumping a bit against the wall is this (light-skinned black) (male) musician, very thin and with a pencil moustache, and I see him and he's strung out and I know that he got back onto heroin, which is why he isn't in the studio right then like he should be, doing a songwriting collab with Bob Dylan and Moby, and I know that Moby made an effort and ended up making it to work with Dylan, but heroin kept this other guy from doing the same thing.

. . .

A dream the other week, of skin.

The other week I dreamnt -

I had my left foot out, and there was this huge crescent of flaking dead skin going across the sole, and I was slowly peeling it back, and there was another huge crescent of flaking dead skin around my lower leg and ankle, and I was thinking to myself, why is there all this dead skin, since it was a little bit much, quantity-wise, though otherwise it was normal, like when you get some dead flaking skin on the bottom of your feet, just a little bit here and there, it was like that, only a lot more of it, and all in one big huge peeling line.

. . .

Multiple huge flies were in my house the other Sunday night:

1) One lit upon a leaf of my houseplant almost directly at eye level across from where I was sitting at my kitchen table, so it was like this big huge black speck on top of a thin green leaf that was like a very thin horizontal line to my eye, since the leaf was sticking out from the stem almost perfectly flat, according to my eye from where I was sitting.

2) Another flew around the bathroom when I was taking a bath, so I swatted it into the bath, and then it was in the water, struggling...  I couldn't get it out with my hand since to try to catch it, it'd just pour out of your hand on top of the water, so I used this metal anti-hairclog inset for my bathtub drain, and swept it through the water like a sieve, and I caught the big fly in it.  Then, I dumped the fly out on the side of the tub, and used the bottom of the anti-hairclog inset to crush it, making this rather surprisingly big moist crushing sound.  A single fly leg separated out from the crushed body on top of a small puddle of water, and it drifted away an inch or so, and just lay there in the water tension.

A sight the other morning on my bike ride in to my library job...

...when the air was cold but the sun strong through the leaves, as I knew fall was here:

A black and white cat dead in the rightmost lane, since someone must have hit it somehow.

I didn't look too close at it as I biked by in the bikelane to its right, since I didn't want to get grossed out.

Great moment from a labor march the other month:

Before and after speeches, they were cueing up disco and R&B on the sound system, and the sea of (black) (women) in front of me kept raising their hands and doing some sassy wrist gesture in time with the music, as they all said "woop woop," just this big giant chorus of them, all in tune and in time with some bit of song.

"woop woop"!

. . .

Comment of a (young) (hip) (black) (male) beachgoer to some girl he was with...

..back on Labor Day, when he was standing on some rocks by the water and massive waves were washing over his feet and lower legs, and he had to keep steadying himself:

"Don't worry, I'm channeling my inner mountain goat."

British culture is so odd.

The other week my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair), was talking about how his mom was getting fed up with the NHS before she retired from being a nurse.

He said that she said that before she retired she hated how she felt rushed with patients more than she used to, but the worst was how the paperwork got worse over all the years, to the point where it'd take up a good chunk of your day to do, and then the bureaucrat who did nothing but coordinate the paperwork made more money than you did, all for doing nothing.

"She said that back in the day, the matron supervised," he was like.  "The matron actually had a lot of power."

When he said that, it was so odd, to hear someone talk and for them "matron" was just a word you used, and it wasn't some shit in a novel.

It really is funny how they talk English, but so many of their cultural reference points are different.  They're much farther away from us than Canadians, for example.

An odd dream of my house plant.

The other night, I dreamnt -

I was looking at my house plant, and it was thriving, but mold was here and there on the stem, and at one part towards the base it was narrowed all around since it was eaten away, almost to the point where it'd break off, and to the point where it looked like a grape stem, right where it joins into a grape.

Only, the stem wasn't green anymore there, it was all brown and discolored, so it got me worrying that the plant was sick, and would die soon, since it'd be choked off from all of its nutrients.

. . .

A coworker's find in the deep library bookstacks:

Tucked away on the empty end of a shelf, an empty PBR tallboy can.

Response of a library co-worker, to my new joke.

My new joke I was telling all the (undergraduate) students at my library job like a month ago, was, I'd set them up by saying that I was going to tell them a life lesson, and then I'd be like, "Remember, always shit on the clock."

Like the third student I told that to was a sophomore, and he was like, "Of course!".

Then, he was like, "That's 101."

A dream of a library.

The other week, I dreamnt -

I'm in a library, and there's multiple floors, and each has like a twelve by twelve square cut off and railed off, and for some reason that's how I cross between floors.

On one floor, I can't see the books around me, and there's this very odd looking light blue staircase, and some (men) beckon me up, but I tell one to keep going first, since I'm afraid that if we're both on it at the same time, that it'll collapse.

Next, I'm crawling up like a poorly positioned rope ladder and with difficulty trying to throw my leg over a floor, and I can see the bookstacks around me, and a well-dressed man in a suit walks by, next to his wife in a tasteful paisley burka.

Then, I get up onto that floor, and as I go into a room, a woman passes by in my peripheral vision.

Next thing I know, the police are asking me about her, since it turns out she disappeared, and they're gathering all clues to the crime.

I want to tell them more in order to help them, but I hardly even noticed her presence, she was just there and gone, and I really have nothing to say.

. . .

A dream of the beach:

The other week, I dreamnt -

I'm standing before a white wall in a foyer, and there's red tiles and an open door, and just beyond there's a line of sand and then the blue water of the ocean, and I can feel the heat just billowing and billowing in onto me.

And, I think, I should be going swimming, but for some reason, I'm not, and I kind of feel bad, but I also feel lazy.

. . .

A dream that I don't quite remember.

The other week, I dreamnt -

I'm standing and doing something, and I jerk back on my heels -

And at that point my heels, which are sticking off my bed, tense up all of a sudden, and wake me up.

I had moved like I was moving in the dream, very severely, only now, I can't quite remember what I was doing in the dream, only that it carried over into real life and woke me up.

Got a bug.

The other week I met my one art school friend who wears women's clothes, and like always I ended up clubbing till 5am.

Walking home from the subway, I ended up vomiting a bit by the sides of two trees just before my house, though I wasn't all that drunk.

The next day I woke up around 2pm, laid in bed some, got up and threw up around 4pm, then slept from like then until like 9pm.

Then, I got up, had some watermelon and water, read, and went to bed from like midnight till 7am.

Then next day, I got ready to go to work, but when I bent over, I felt woozy, so I called in sick and went to sleep for another three hours, and I wasn't quite myself for the rest of the day.

I almost think that I had some sort of bug.

There's no earthly reason I should have slept that much, or been as vomiting as much as I was; it's not like I was all that hammered.

I texted my one art school friend who wears women's clothes, and he wonders if we got muscle relaxant or roofied or something, he said he was off for like a day-and-a-half too, and alternately sleepy and tired and depressive.

He said it also could have been poor tap lines at one of the bars we went to.

That's my hunch, with what it was.

An aspect of my blog:

I tend to write posts around a month ahead of time, so if I get busy and miss a bit, there's still all the once-a-day content coming.

That's why I start so many posts with "the other week" or "the other month," so that the time reflected within the post is somewhat accurate, by the time that they're published and people start reading them.

Sometimes I've thought, then, that if I die suddenly, my blog will go on for a bit longer, like probably for around a month, and then it will suddenly stop, though by that time I'll have been dead for around a month by then.

It's like dead people on Facebook, where they pop up on a birthday notice, but they're actually gone.

I've heard stories about people posting "Happy birthday!" on the walls of distant acquaintances or friends who they hadn't been in touch with, when those people were long gone, so it turned out that they were wishing happy birthday to dead people without knowing it.

Isn't technology wonderful?

:O

(This post is just a morbid reflection; nothing actually going on here with me.)

Two sights from a stroll by the quarry park, the other day:

1) In the park next door, (Chinese) women were on an otherwise empty tennis court doing that synchronized line-dancing thing, and "Pomp and Circumstance" was blaring but their movements didn't quite synch with it, so I was left wondering if they were dancing to some music that I couldn't quite hear, and "Pomp and Circumstance" was actually coming from elsewhere.

2) As I walked up a slope, I noticed decaying milkweed pods, with red beetles here and there among the pod spines and de-petalled flowers.

Comment of one (Latina) tr*nny I know...

...when I bumped into her at that one trashy nightclub that I sometimes go to, and I mentioned that I was thinking of running for alderman:

"Yes," she was like, "The young ones, they don't know what they want."

. . .

(I think she misheard the word, or doesn't know what an "alderman" is.)

Random library job task:

Going through every shelving section in a region, and lifting up the too-tall spine-down books in vast series, to see if they're in the right order.

Many weren't, and after just a bit of work, my back ached.

I told a co-worker I had that job, and he was like, "Man, that is my least favorite task, that job sucks."

He then said that he sympathized with me.

An odd dream of teeth.

The other week I dreamt -

I was speaking with some kind of tooth or gum doctor, and they were showing me a black-and-white diagram of my lower jaw.

My gum tissue was deteriorating in the back and my back molars were getting pulled back, and on the right side one smaller tooth a bit farther up was being pushed out by two teeth that were too close on either side behind it, so there were small arrows on the right side of the diagram showing how that one set of teeth would be manipulated a bit backward to cover up the emerging gap, at least on the righthand bottom side of my mouth.

It mildly didn't make sense to me how it worked, but I didn't say anything to the doctor.

And then, I woke up.

. . .

Defensive reactions of some (white) (male) Trump voters in the metro Detroit area...

...that I got when visiting family there back in August, and the subject of politics came up:

1) "I wasn't for Trump so much as against Hillary."

2) "It's sad, he had some good ideas."

(Both were swing voters, and a bit embarrassed now; my mother was surprised that both seemed to vote Trump, though neither came out and right said it.)

Bike swarm.

Last month, I was biking downtown through the city's Chinatown, and I biked around (two) (tween) (Asian-American) girls on bicycles just before getting to that neighborhood, and neither had helmets on, and one had headphones on and was lacksadaisical, though it was a very busy street.

One then biked around me when I slowed down a street ahead, and then as I biked up, she turned right beneath a viaduct, and for some reason I looked back and all of a sudden I did a double-take, since there was like ten or twelve (tween) (Asian-American) kids, all on bikes and none with helmets, all turning in the same direction, including the other little girl of the first two that I had seen.

I then biked up like four or five more blocks, and I was at this crazy intersection where you have to wait a long while at the light, and there's a set aside bike lane but it's not completely blocked off from traffic and it's tough with parking and driveways in the busiest section of the city's Chinatown, and as the light turned, I started pedalling, and all of a sudden from the right off a side street there comes the entire swarm of bike kids, and they're ahead of me two and three and four deep and bleeding into the busy street, lazily but steadily pedalling along and weaving in and out and here and there roughly in the bike lane, but now and again outside of it a bit, as cars sped by.

I was mesmerized, but also worried for their safety.

Fortunately, many of them stopped off soon after, but still, they could have been killed by a stray car.

Where are their parents?  Do they know that they do this?

A dream of decay.

The other week I was dreaming -

My eyes were somewhere to the upper back left of my head like I was outside myself, and I was also in myself doing some pro-active dental hygiene.

My mouth was open like I had no upper jaw or even head, and my gums were a pale purplish bloody red and mountainous, particularly the one on the left.

I had my hand up, and was gently massaging it a bit here and a bit there towards the top, and I kept thinking to myself, that nothing would probably help.

Yet, I kept doing it.

. . .

Odd perception.

Last month I was at the beach and I ate a banana, and then I ate some cherries, and I ended up putting the stems and little bit cherry flesh-covered pits on the peel, and then after I was done reading a free newspaper, I put the newspaper beside my towel, and the pit-covered peel on top of it, so I could just wrap it all up and go throw it out without dropping anything, the next time I got up.

A bit later, a (white) (mildly hipsterish) guy I know who works at the library walked by.

"What's that?", he was like.

"Oh, a banana peel and some cherry pits from some cherries I was eating," I was like, looking at the thing and noticing just then that it looked weird.

"Oh," he was like.  "I thought you were foraging."

. . .

He must have thought it was some weird roots or herbs.

Observation about Beethoven.

Last month I was at an outdoor concert with a college friend, where they played some Beethoven.

After it was all done, "Imagine composing all that while you're deaf," she was like.

I agreed, but afterwards when I wanted to tell that story to other people, I wondered how disabilities folks would feel about that statement, so I didn't.

It's almost like valorizing the disability as something that someone nobly struggles against, and is just a little bit too pat.

I wonder, though, can a person recognize that dynamic anymore, where a disabled person perseveres despite challenges from their disability?

Odd morning commute obstacle.

The other day before going in to work at my school's library, I wheeled my bike out from the back enclosed porch, and around the house and over the sidewalk and over the mini-lawn onto the street, and then I hopped on it in order to go south, after saying "Good morning" to a(n older) (husky) (bearded) (white) guy who just happened to be walking by then.

But, from the construction site just south of me where they had demolished some houses and are now building some new houses, there was a van double-parked on the one side of the street, and two guys hauling this thin, like thirty foot board across the street, one towards like one end, and the other towards the other end, though the board was remarkably stiff and really didn't sag all that much, as it stretched across the entire street and just kept blocking it and blocking it and blocking it.

So, since they were walking slow and the board kept stretching across the entire street, I actually just turned around and headed north, to go around another way to my job.

"Never expected that obstacle on my morning commute!", I said to the guy who I had said "Good morning" to, as I biked by.

A story of a gym gate attendant.

The other week I was going into the gym on campus, and I said a chit-chatty hi to the gym gate attendant like I always do.

The gym gate attendant that day was this short kind of brown (white) (bro-ey) guy, and when I asked him how he was, he was not only like "Tired," but then he was like, "I was up way late last night because I had to go to the ER."

"I'm very sorry about that," I was like.  "What happened?".

"Oh, it's no biggie," he was like.  "I was moving furniture, and I gashed my leg."

"Ouch," I was like.

"Yeah, I had to go to the ER and everything," he was like.  "Then, when I get home at four in the morning, I still have to move the furniture before I can go to bed.  So, I'm tired."

A graduating senior's two stories:

1) He was so mad at that new Democratic slogan that debuted a bit ago that said "Better Skills," and he thought that it encapsulated how out of touch the party elites were, to even be thinking that way.

2) His apartment this summer shares a courtyard with a bunch of (young) (Irish) people, most of who are here on summer work visas, but some of who are here illegally and found work anyways.

The other day they were up drinking till like six-thirty in the morning, and then one of the (Irish) guys stopped drinking for ten minutes, and then left to go to work to shovel concrete all day.

"That must have sucked," the graduating senior was like.   "To be drunk and tired and hungover and shovelling concrete in the sun all day."

My mother's stories of books (2 of 2): Serendipity.

During that same conversation, my mom was saying how the reference librarian had hopped online when she was there to get a nutrition book for her coworker with cancer, since she had been wanting it, and since it wouldn't really interfere with her treatments, but was more like palliative care and would just make her feel better and like she was doing something.

"Then we look down into the book donation box," my mom was like, "And right on top there's a new copy of that book, isn't that freaky?".

"I guess so," I was like.

"But you never get nutrition books in the book donation box, the rest of it was all like suspense novels!  And it was new, too, and sitting right on top."

I right away wondered if the reference librarian hopped back online to cancel her order, but my mom never said, and we got to talking about other stuff.

My mother's stories of books (1 of 2): Popularity.

The other weekend, I was chit-chatting with my mother on the phone.

She's been back at work at the local library in my hometown even though she's retired, since one of the workers got cancer, and she's been filling in for her.

When we were talking about the general state of the economy, I was mentioning how the internet gutted a lot of professions, like how call centers and coding got shipped abroad, and how many legal services have gotten automated where you just use a program to write wills and whatnot.

"That's our most popular book at the library," my mom was like.  "It's about how to write up your own divorce papers."

Then, she paused.

Then, she was like, "Actually, it's two books, one for dependents, one for without."

Confession of my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend.

The other week I was hanging out with my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair), and we started talking about Trump.

Then, she made a confession.

"I always knew he was going to win," she was like.

"Really?!", I was like.  "You never told me that!".

"I didn't," she was like, "But I knew it all the time and was just dreading the election.  Everyone was saying it was so safe and in the bag and not to worry, but then the crazies won, it was just like Brexit."

A work day at the library:

I'm in the stacks, shelf-reading.

Out of nowhere, a guy speaks to me and makes me jump.

"Do you know the way out of here?", he's like, and I tell him.

"Thanks, sir," he's like.

When I go to leave a little while later, the heavy clicker for recording the number of mistakes, bounces from side to side on my chest as I walk, since it's hanging there from a cord.

I look at it, and it's almost like it's bouncing on this firm pad of fat right below where my ribs stop.

Odd dream of an alien invasion.

The other week, I dreamt -

It was some sort of odd alien invasion, and I was by forests and swamps, trying to evade capture.

At some point, there was an alien train-ish truck sort of thing pulled up on some tracks, and it had like a boxcar with a lot of variously cartonned shelves which were all open with a lot of space in between them, and so I sidled up to it and climbed into it and upwards towards the top here and there on the open shelves, to get out of sight and and hide, so that when the truck moved I could move with it and out of the area that I was in with much less risk of being captured.

Up there, I got on to a top shelf, and then I noticed that there was an area that was further above that that was like a windowed cab with bunks, and there I saw two old friends from years ago from my masters program, who had been caught by the aliens and were being used as watchers and so lived in that cab, and they took me in.

At some point, we set off, and the boxcar-like thing drifted up, and it was tied by a long string to the truck that was pulling it, and at some point we hovered over swamps, and at some point swung up and high to where we could see treetops, and I felt disoriented because the boxcar-like thing's motions violated physics, since it seemed to have much less weight than it should, though it roughly followed the faraway car like a half-empty balloon being tugged.

All the while, my friends watched out the sides cautiously, fulfilling the aliens' commands and seeking people who hadn't been rounded up yet, though I was there with them, hidden, thanks to chance.

. . .

An observation by a fellow bar patron.

After being asked what book I was reading at a bar the other week, I showed a fellow bar patron the cover of Ursula K. LeGuin's "A Wizard of Earthsea."

"Oh," he was like, "Is that part of a series?".

"Yeah," I was like.  "How did you know?".

"Because it's short," he was like.  "And also, all books about wizards are like that.  There's always three or four."

Beach barbecue occurrence (2 of 2): Moonlight swim.

During all of that going away party / beach barbecue, the air was chilly and there was a slight breeze, but people kept saying that the water was warmer than the air, though I didn't quite believe them.

Even though I was in my swimsuit, I didn't feel like going in all that much, but finally when it was about time to leave, some people were swimming in the moonlight, and my optometrist student friend who was going away convinced me to come in.

As I was swimming, two of the party guests who are these brothers from the neighborhood that everyone knows, got out of the water one and then the other, and they were both naked.

"I'm not sure how cool I am with this naked brother action," I told my optometrist student friend, and she laughed that loud laugh of hers.

Later, when we were both about to get out, and we both were paddling by the ladder by the rocks, I was like, "After you," and she was like, "No, after you, I'm peeing," and I was like, "I need to pee too!", and so we each held on to one side of the ladder and gently paddled, peeing.

"Synchronized pissing," I was like. "I'm not sure if this is more or less disturbing than the naked brother action."

Beach barbecue occurrence (1 of 2): Conversation.

Like a month ago at an optometrist student friend's going away party / beach barbecue, I met a ton of new people, including this wispy (white) (late 20s) woman with brown hair and short shorts and an olive shirt.

She did massage, and was going out to northern Cali / Oregon to give cash-under-the-table massages to people who worked the pot harvest.

And then, she was done.

"I'm done touching other people," she said, softly.

"Oh," I was like.  "How long have you been in massage therapy?".

"Two years," she was like.

Between the massages and helping out with the pot harvest, she was hoping to save enough to move to India for a while.

"Their philosophy resonates with me," she was like.

As we were snacking and talking by the taco table, some guy in swim shorts passed by and it looked like he had three bed bug bites on his back, two over below his left shoulder and one higher up on his right.

She saw me looking, and so I was like, "I think those are bed bug bites."

She then said that she stayed a month between leases with some friends, and she got 63 bites, and they stayed there for months, though some people don't react to the bites at all, like one of her friends.

So, that opened up a floodgate, and I told her about my bed bug ordeal.

Amidst all of that outpouring, I also told her how my bed bugs were back, but I hadn't had anything for like a week.

At that point, she was like, "I know they're gone, I get that vibe."

Two sights on the same stretch of street, the same day a few weeks ago:

1) On the way biking in to work in the morning:

A (young) (black) woman in a gray car with her window rolled down, making a lefthand turn and singing along to that Rihanna song that goes "work work work work work."

2) On the way biking back from work in the nighttime, maybe like at 9:30pm:

A (young) (black) girl in shoes with bright white flashing lights in the soles, standing between a car parked by the curb and a van idling in the street, and these (black) adults in a group around her talking loudly, and as I get closer I can hear Creole or some West African language or something.

Odd post-5pm sight downtown:

The coat-check girl from that one trashy nightclub, in professional garb and good make-up, walking down the street near that one big department store that she had mentioned to me years ago that she also works at.

She must have just been getting off of work, and she was walking on the streets just like all the other downtown workers on the streets after 5pm on a weekday.

I said "hi," and she smiled and said "hi" back as we passed each other.

Lying in bed post-dissertation.

For like a week after I finished my dissertation, I was just tired.

On the weekends, I noticed that I just kept waking up and lying in bed and then going back to sleep and waking up and lying in bed again, for like an hour or two past when my alarm rang, and I was always knowing that I should get up, but the bed felt so good, so I just stayed in it.

It's not like before I was working through the weekend or anything - I always would take off at least one full day a weekend! - but it was nice to have the time and not have this pressure on in the back of my mind, from a large project, which is what I think allowed me to recognize that possibility for laziness, and take advantage of it.

Linguistic slip-ups...

...said by a person on a video segment in an online training module that I'm required to complete for a new job:

- "enumerous" (for "numerous," but also like "enumerated"?).

- "pacific" (for "specific").

You wonder how that got on there, since no other video had someone making speech mistakes like that.

He only appeared in just that one video, though, whereas a lot of other people were featured across multiple clips.

Odd interaction with a squirrel.

The other week I left my house early afternoon to head into the library for work, and there was a squirrel on the sidewalk.

Instead of scampering up the tree, though, it just sat and actually turned a few steps towards me until it was like two-and-a-half feet from me and facing me.

I wondered right then if it had rabies, but it didn't pursue me as I walked past it.

I'm thinking now that maybe people had been giving it treats or something, and it's young and stupid.

It looked like a young squirrel, too.

Political workshop (2 of 2): VAN.

As I learned at the political workshop, the big voter info file that comes from the government and is supplemented by the political party is called "VAN."

I made a joke about coming off as a sex offender because registering young voters would be "putting kids in the VAN," and then one operative said that one time when he was working for a candidate in the Quad Cities in Iowa, he was having a cigarette outside a diner by the street next to an actual van and there was trouble with the system and from which end you could import/export information to it, so he was yelling in the phone "to put people in one side of the VAN, and if that doesn't work, try the other!", and when he looked up, all the people on the patio were staring at him.

He then said that he said it was an acronym, that he was working for the other campaign than he was actually working for, and went inside, but that ending to the story didn't strike me as true, but as someone too-clever cooking up an ending for an already solid anecdote.

Political workshop (1 of 2): My weak alderman.

The other weekend I went to a weekend-long workshop on the nuts-and-bolts of political campaigns.

We have a machine alderman in my ward, and I ended up catching this (young) (latino) alderman afterwards, who had beaten a long-term incumbent in his part of the city.

He said not only that his sense was that the guy was vulnerable because last time he went to a run-off, but also that someone didn't have to even be from the neighborhood necessarily, since all the studies he's seen show no demonstration that that's a negative, and you can get around the political dynamics with your platform.

From everything that everyone was saying, I almost got a hankering to try to take down the local alderman, to be honest.  I do like a challenge, and the guy's from an old-time political family, so it'd be a blast if I did end up winning.

I almost wonder if I could do it.  I have the Midwest thing down - I'd probably have pictures of me at my hometown festival in the mailing, and me with my great aunt the nun - and I have the labor thing down - I unionized a fucking workplace, for Christ's sake! - and I do know how to put down shoe leather, and it's all about talking to voters.

I also have some ideas for some unifying platforms, and concrete issues to appeal to voters.

I think maybe I'll work with a progressive campaign this time, learn the ropes, and run next time if that guy doesn't win.

It'd certainly be a learning experience!

For now, though, I just want to work on my book ideas.

Bad sign for big labor?

A guy I know from adjunct unionization went on to work for a major national union, and when I saw him the other weekend, he was putting feelers out into finding another job.

He said what with the upcoming SCOTUS right-to-work rulings and the declining percentage of Americans in unions, it just didn't make all that much sense to try and stay in it long-term.

Somehow I get the sense that we're at a low point, though, and things are about to explode in a major way.

People just don't have all that much to lose any more.

For example, just talk to any college kid, and so many of them just see a long horizon of debt and precarious low-paid jobs ahead of them.

To me, at least, they seem like prime unionizing material.

Mother of all double runs.

The other week I was shelf-reading at my library job up in a folios section, and I discovered the mother of all double runs:

An entire section (like a book shelf) with one run of numbers, and then another like third of a book shelf afterwards that began where the entire section did and went through the same run of numbers, before merging into the numbers that came afterwards and everything was normal again.

I had no idea how to even deal with something that large, so I tilted some books down on their spines to mark it, and then when I finished shelf-reading I brought the issue to the attention of one of my supervisors.

He didn't seem all that concerned that there might be some books declared lost in there - someone could have easily sought a book in one part of the double run and not the other and then went and declared it lost! - and so he said to report it the next time that I worked, and more than likely I'd be the one sent to fix it, where I'd go up with a cart and merge the books.

Blithe confession of a fellow beachgoer.

The other week I was at the beach and ran into this one (quite old) (ex-counterculture) (black) guy who I've known for a number of years now.

He's retired and a self-confessed "beach bum," and we chat a lot, and I hand off to him some of the free newspapers from the city when I'm done reading them, since he likes poking around through them.

(I also lend them to him and ask him to give them back to me, if I bump into him and he asks about them and I haven't read them yet.)

Anyhow, he lives in one of the city's worst neighborhoods, and has a fruit tree by his house that used to be his mother's, and it's near the house of his brother, who's been housebound from some sickness.

He tells me stories sometimes, like about the illegal parties down the block that are advertised on Facebook and are BYOB with strippers and often go until five in the morning, and cause shit to happen like this one time a drunkdriver got in his SUV and drove through someone's fence and almost into their house.

Anyhow, the other week he told me kind of out of nowhere that he has his electricity and gas hotwired and doesn't pay for them.

"I figure," he was like, "that [name of the gas company] can afford it!".

News at the local supermarket.

Over the past month, when I've gone in to the local supermarket, a couple of times there's a been a (younger) (male) (Mexican) cashier; one on two occasions, and one different one a different time just last week.

Otherwise, the store has the (Mexican) men do shelving and deli, and women do the bakery and all the cashier spots.

The (Mexican) cashier guys seemed a bit soft, so I almost wondered if they were gay, and that's why they got assigned to women's work.

Even if not, it's still a development of some kind.

Jobs are so weird nowadays...

So, my two part-time jobs that had seemed like good deals may not be at all.

Both had seemed good, but both are now getting a bit cage-y with how many hours I'm getting, and with the one I've been waiting to get assigned to clients forever, so I'm not making any money there, and it's not clear when I'll even start making any money.

On top of that, my school out-of-nowhere revoked the ability of students to continue their library jobs for one term past graduation, and that was what I was depending on for like three-and-a-half months, to get me through this uncertainty with 2 part-time jobs!

So, I'm going to start budgeting the only way I can:

I'll go to a food pantry, the very week that my diploma is mailed.

You'll be damn sure that I'm going to take a selfie, with my diploma, and with my bag of food pantry food.

I did write my writing job people, to see if I could continue on past graduation, but even that won't be resolved till my library job is up because they too wait till the last minute to schedule you, so it still makes sense to go to a food pantry, so I can save and hold on to a bit more money, just in case.

In any case, effectively, I'm going to dial back my provisional availability for my tutoring job, to make space for my possible writing job, and then let my still-in-a-holding-pattern elder care job know that that day is taken up with my writing job, if they don't schedule anything by the middle of next month.

What nonsense.

I have three jobs, but no job at the same time.

Confusion of me as a professor.

So, when I was popping into the library to do some stuff this summer, I ran into a (Chinese) student who I taught writing to, who had just completed her first year.

We chit-chatted about the summer, and when I said that I had just completed my dissertation that Friday, she was confused.

She had thought all along that I was a professor!

She also said that the class was amazing, and that she was considering being an anthro major, and had gotten a position in the campus museum, since the museum visits from class really sparked an interest that she didn't know that she had.

I told her that the prof who I worked with had just finished her first year teaching that class, and she should write her about the museum visits, so that she knew that they were effective and so she could keep them in the future, since she had been wondering about that.

Really, that's the part of teaching that I'll miss.  Oh well, the sector doesn't support it so much any more!

I tell people that you know a sector's in trouble, when it starts driving the good people out.