What townies in my neighborhood call the block that I used to live on:

"Little Mexico."

This (older middle-aged) (white) woman who I had met at a neighborhood bar was the child of (Lithuanian) immigrants and had lived in the neighborhood all her life, and when we were talking about the neighborhood, how long I had lived there, etc., and I had mentioned where my old apartment was, she was like, "Oh, yeah, that stretch is called 'Little Mexico'.".

HONESTLY.  A single city block is named that way!  How very old neighborhood-y and hyperlocal.

Tricky garden theft.

The other week I was having dinner with my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair), and he was like, "Do you want a salad?", and when I said "Yes," he was like, "Well, let's go to the garden and get some lettuce," and then we both decamped to go off to a few blocks away, where there's the urban garden plot that he had signed up for and is growing this year.

He started at his plot, and he was picking leaves from a couple different varieties of lettuce, pausing to pick off some stems where they were going to go start to flower, since that ruins the taste, he was saying.

Then, he went over to the other beds that weren't his, and he began picking a single leaf off of each different head of lettuce, to add to the variety of our greens, but so that way the owners of those lettuce heads would never know that anything was ever taken.

Very tricky!

I wonder how he came up with that idea.

On mating strategies of southern Europeans.

The other weekend I was out for drinks with a library coworker who's doing a Ph.D. in Comp Lit.

He was telling me that a girl he once dated had once told him that Southern European grad student men have a few mating strategies.

One is most often employed by Italians, and it's to be volubly sophisticated and bombastic; they talk a lot and domineer conversations, and know a bit of everything about everything, often in a very joke-y way.

The other is most often employed  by the French, and it's to be silent and broody in the hopes that people confuse that for profundity.

"Like [first name of a French grad student known to us both]," my one coworker was like.

"Really?", I was like.

"Oh yeah," he was like.  "He's really a simple person and not very intellectual at all, he just poses that way."

In any case, the really funny part is that I had just finished a pop science book on the biology of animal mating, and it was funny to think of this Romance Languages Dept. ecology of adaptive behaviors all going on.

A dream of a friend who runs marathons.

The other month I dreamnt -

A friend who runs marathons is talking to me very earnestly, and is brimming full of enthusiasm for this race he does where at a certain point they paint blocks across the pavement like a film frame, and they put pictures in the frames, and as you run you keep your head down and if you set the right pace you just get into a zone, and keep watching and watching and watching the pavement like a movie as you run.

. . .

My one hippie friend from Michigan on my recurrence of bedbugs:

"There's no way they could have held on, that's the price you pay for living in [the city I live in]."

I miss the art school student body.

The other week at a party, a friend-of-a-friend was this (fatter) (kind of butch) (white) girl who had just finished her BFA.

It turns out that she was into sculpture, and she showed me two pictures of ice sculptures on her phone.

She had done an internship at that company, and then as a test for a job they made her show up and sprung on her two things to carve.

"I love the huskie," I was like.

"I know, isn't it cool?!?!?", she was like, all full of enthusiasm.

Then, I shared my misgivings with her about student debt from there, and fortunately she had transferred in, and she said her loans were just on the edge of manageability.

"Now you just have to focus on finding a job like you did on creating your portfolio," she was like.  "If you do that, you'll be okay."

I wasn't so sure about that, but for her sake, I agreed, and so I said that I was happy to hear from her that her loans were manageable and that she thought that the school was worth it.

A fun exchange witnessed at my local supermarket:

(Middle-aged) (Latina) mom walking out holding a watermelon over her belly, to her kind-of-bored son walking besides her:  "Hey, you run ahead to the car, and I'll roll it over to you!"

[The son perks up and scampers over to the car, and turns around all expectantly.]

The (middle-aged) (Latina) mom: "Oh no, I was just kidding!"

. . .

LOL.