Work observation (2 of 2): Low-wage jobs.

The other week, one of the aides was saying that her husband couldn't find good work, so he went back to school for multiple degrees in business that set him back maybe like $60,000 in debt, and he was getting job offers for full-time work at maybe $20,000 a year, though he's now finally got one consulting offer that pays like $40 an hour.

One of the other aides who's (Ethiopian) had lost her parking lot attendant job that paid $18 an hour a few years ago after working there a decade, so she had to go to school to get a Certified Nursing Assistant license, with which she makes either minimum wage or $14 an hour if she's the one passing out medications that day, though she's lucky since her and her son got lotteried into public housing and they only pay like $400 a month in rent.

I then was telling people about how all the jobs in retail are getting chopped up into "on call" positions so you can't count on 40 hours a week at minimum wage, and my one (Mexican) coworker and one of my (Tibetan) coworkers were surprised to hear that that made our job relatively desirable and a "good job," even though it's minimum wage.

The more you press down and look into it, jobs are total crap nowadays and no-one can do anything about it, and if there's any noticeable movement it's in the liquidation of good jobs into part-paying temporary ones that pay crap.

Honestly, if living expenses go up any more while wages stay flat, we're going to hit a crisis point with people losing housing and whatnot, it's that bad, from everything that I can see.

It's like the workers in Silicon Valley who pay to live in people's garages.

Work observation (1 of 2): Staff meal perk.

So, my one job at the resthome is minimum wage, but we get a staff  meal (usually something cheap like salads or bologna or pasta, or this really really good chicken salad with cut-up bits of celery and pickles in it, all over and above some of the soup that the residents get).

I've stopped bringing in dinner, then, and I just eat a ton of that, and sometimes if there's some left over I take it home in my tupperware, too, which I've started bringing in for that purpose.

You know, since I get at least one meal and maybe another meal or snack out of it, I bet that it saves me at least $60 a month in grocery bills.

I've noticed I don't go through as quickly my snacks at home or my big pot of "dinner for the week" that I cook up, too, and I can put off shopping from once a week to maybe once every 10-12 days.

A person on the subway:

A (late middle-aged) (faded blonde hair) (white) guy with crinkly skin and some kind of reddish blood-vessel-and-scabby growth over a big portion of half his cheek, and a baseball cap, who puts some framed paintings beside his seat and sets his backpack down and then pulls out like 5-6 comic books and crosses his leg and keeps them on his lap and flips rapidly through them, as he slouches and his cheeks bulge out as he chews what appears to be a huge amount of gum, sometimes with his mouth opening a bit in a quietish smacking sound.

Then, he occasionally begins to blow bubbles.

As he gets up to leave later and puts the comic books back in his backpack, his keys fall out on his seat and I tell him that, and he says "I know" and then turns around and gets them, and then turns back to me and says "Thanks."

A nightmare of captive women.

The other week I dreamt -

I'm in a very white laboratory, and I know that women are held there, and then as me and a woman walk past this wall, I look over and open a slot, and inside there's a water tank and a (white) woman with a shaved head, and she has this big plug in her mouth and the water level is high and her very nose is just above water so she can breathe if she keeps it above water and tries, and I know that she has it worst of all of them and they keep her like that so they can remove the plug and have her talk only when they want to.

Even though there's no room through the slot for us to reach and the water was initially very high, next thing you know the water level is down and she has her shoulders above water and the plug is out of her mouth and her mouth and jaw are hurting, and she says something to us, slowly and painfully, and it's clear that she has no will to even try to leave, instead she's made peace with her existence there in the tank, and she goes to go back to her position, behind the wall in the water in the dark with the water high and the plug in her mouth.

. . .

And then I wake up.

Some campaign work with my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend.

The other week I met my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend for dinner (the brother of the brother-sister pair), and he helped me stuff some envelopes for a bit after dinner, where he folded the letters and then I put them in envelopes and licked them shut.

And, while I did that, I found that he accidentally included a second copy of the same letter in one of the letters he had folded, and then he looked through the pile he had heaped up and he found a second one just like that.

"Dang," I was like, since I had already sealed so many envelopes, but then I collected myself and explained that I'm trying to be less neurotic, and what's the worst case scenario anyhow --

And at that point he broke in and was like, "Twice as much paper in the dustbin."

I laughed, and then I continued my thought, that maybe one or 2 voters got a double copy, and in the big scheme of things, it really doesn't matter.

A good coworker.

The other week I was talking a bit of politics with someone at the resthome, and one of my (Tibetan) coworkers out of nowhere said that she could never live like Michael Cohen.

"So many people in the world, they're so evil, I would rather have nothing and lead a good life," she was like.

I then asked her, and she said she was a Buddhist, but that had nothing to do with it, it was just her perspective.

She also said that sometimes she looks at the world and she sees so many evil people, and it seems like there's more of them than the good people, and she just wonders if it will ever change.

A dark side of the resthome.

The other week I had to speak with the (quick-speaking) (Vietnamese-American) nurse about one (older) (male) resident who I rather like, and she was like, "He's not right in the head," and she then told me that back when he first arrived and women would help him, he asked a woman who was giving him a shower to wash down by his private parts.

"She said no, you can reach, and wouldn't," the nurse told me in a low voice and very seriously, and she pursed her lips in disapproval.

The next time I saw him afterwards, I felt weird around him, to think that he'd do that to a woman.

I also thought of that the next time his wife came to visit, and they were there together as a normal couple.

It really is life, to project total goodness on to old people and then to have reality contradict your (condescending?) infantilization.  Just because they're old doesn't mean they're not a mixed bag of weirdness and power and hidden places.