Librarians are such nice people.

Librarians can be such nice people.

The other week I was doing some research at the city's main library branch downtown, and I decided to pop by this one nearby law school's library, to follow up on an email that I had sent them almost two weeks earlier to see if I could come in and consult a book but I had never heard back about.

The security guard at the building entrance called up, and then she asked me when I had written them, and then she said to wait, and the next thing I knew I had an escort upstairs, and they had the book for me to consult and take notes from, and they said I could stay there and do it.

As it turned out, the book was super helpful and I read and took notes from it for over an hour.

I thanked them on the way out, and the security guard downstairs too, and I wrote a thank-you note to follow up.

They're a private school, and they *totally* didn't have to do that. 

It saved me about a couple of hours of travel time, to get to another copy I could have consulted.

Post-campaign realizations/resolutions:

1) After the campaign, I've realized between that and jobs and everything, that I often feel that I have less and less control over the ability to shape my life, and that a lot of that is due to inequalities in inherited wealth and social class, and how I got diverted down the path of elite careers that in retrospect I needed more money for, to truly be a competitor, as our economy's and our country's evolved even since my youth.

2) After the campaign, I've realized that I'm no longer going to do get-out-the-vote for local elections where it's someone who could self-fund the initial campaign start-up.  I see that now in terms of classes of candidates, and it would just be weird for me who lacked the resources to properly fund my start-up, to go and volunteer for someone whose equal I am, or better, and the only difference is that they have the money to "be that person" and I simply didn't...  Yes, they're probably a better candidate than their opponent and so they need help and I'd be better off if they got into office, but it's one of the only ways that I can revoke my assent from our ossifying class system in our country, so that's what I'm going to do, nothing personal.  It's more of a dignity / self-respect thing, not them, nothing personal.

Happy resthome news.

The other week was the one resthome resident who wants to die's wedding anniversary.

Even though her husband's been dead for years, it's her tradition to watch a DVD video transfer of their 50th wedding anniversary party on the day of their anniversary, and she's been doing this for years on that day.

This year I guess was the first year that she forgot and didn't even notice the actual day and what day it was, but her kids called her up to remind her and she ended up watching the DVD thanks to them, even though she had forgotten about it.

I put it in for her in the evening, then, and even when I was digging it out from all her stuff, she just had this broad smile on her face like I haven't seen before, and it was there for the entire time that she watched the video.

I've simply never seen her so happy.

Many of her friends and relatives were dead, and I don't think she even was listening to their speeches and whatnot they were giving, but she was just watching their presence again, since it'd been so long, and it just made her so happy.

A reflection on taxes this year.

This year my taxes were something else, what with income from five jobs, the revised form making me need a few schedules and then a few forms to support those few schedules, and then the check I had to pay the IRS, which required a form too to send in with everything.

(All together, I had to send in like 13 different pieces of paper for my federal return, me, who made like $28,000 last year, in what was relatively a good year, though it didn't feel like it at the time, especially since it wasn't clear till summer that I could get a consistent forty hours a week of work.)

All in all, I had to pay like $1400 to the feds and the state, most to the feds.

That caused problems in itself, since I had to figure out if I should get a loan from the IRS or the bank or make my balance go really low, which opens up problems of "less than the minimum balance" fees.

Even though a loan from the IRS would have had the fee waived since my income is so low, I decided to take out a new credit card with zero percent interest for a over a year, since even though I'd have a percentage fee on my balance transfer, I'd still save on interest overall, and that would make it just one thing to pay off and I know that I can do that in a year.

What nonsense, all this makes me do, when I have so little income and am already getting shafted in so many ways.

And it really makes me mad how many rich people and rich corporations pay no taxes at all, and suddenly me who has nothing has to come up with $1400 or a plan to pay that, amidst all these intricacies.

Balzac tidbits.

I love Balzac, both how he classes up the world into discernible chunks and patterns with their own logic that you have to grasp, and how so much of his observations about behavior are super aphoristic and perceptive but are stuff you wouldn't necessarily actually think up yourself.

Lately, I've been reading "The Chouans," and I creased the page down at two points:

- Someone says that "[c]ast down among the debris of a ruined world, he aspires to build the future from the past."

(This is so like so many nostalgic, neurotic people I've seen, especially among the political machine.)

- The narratorial voice observes about a character, "[s]he was led [to a place] by that strange compulsion, as if a spell were laid on us, which makes us look for hope where hope is an absurdity. Daydreams conceived under that enchantment often come true, and then we call them prescience and attribute our prevision to the operation of a real though inexplicable force, a force that the passions always find ready to favour them, like a flatterer who among all his lies sometimes tells the truth."

(This was me, with my recent campaign.)

. . .

I find the setting of this novel interesting, in northwest France during a time of guerilla warfare after the French Revolution.

It's much earlier than his other novels - it was his first major one - and it has such an odd and such a military setting.  Very different, and very Sir Walter Scott it seems, though I've never read any Scott and I don't think I'd like him.

Nail colors.

The other week at the resthome, me and my one (Mexican) coworker were assisting this one resident, and the resident showed me how she had just gotten her nails done.

"That looks nice," I was like, but I said that I was a little bit surprised that she chose that particular color, since something a bit brighter would have tended to match the bolder colors and patterns she usually wears.

"But this is so elegant," my one (Mexican) coworker told me, gesturing to the resident's nails.

Then, she was like to me, 'Your taste is cheap."

At that, I laughed.

"You're probably right," I was like.

Standing invitation with a resthome resident.

Lately I've been working Fridays at the resthome, and this one resident who I help last in the night watches true crime programs on that very same day, and a few times I'd been helping her and she got distracted and so I had to keep my ears open and summarize the program for her so she could go back to watching them and understand them once we got done with whatever we had to do.

One night, the show was really good, and so after I got done helping her, I asked if I could sit down for fifteen or twenty minutes or so and watch it with her, since I didn't have anything else to do till end of shift.

So, we did that, and we enjoyed ourselves a lot.

Since then, if I work a Friday, it's become our routine, and she says I have a "standing invitation."

The best part is that sometimes with her memory issues she has a hard time following stuff, so I catch her up right before it comes back to commercial, with what the status of the case they're presenting is and where it was going right before the show cut to commercial.