New encyclical.

This past Monday morning sharp, I called up the (Catholic) bookstore downtown, to see if they had copies of Pope Francis's new encyclical.

The lady who answered the phone said they weren't in yet, but if I ordered online, it'd count as a preorder and I'd save 10% on it.

She then looked up for me the right web address for their online store, to make sure I had it before I hung up the phone.

I asked her, too, if it was bound in the same way as Laudato Si', which I had also gotten from them, since it was a very nice little bound volume and I liked that format a lot, and she said it was, and that it was even the same color green, since that's the color they gave to all of Pope Francis's writings in that series.

When we ended the conversation, she said "God bless."

Noise mystery, clarified.

Last month, I started getting woken up like a few times a week at like 9:30am, by the kids upstairs being like really super noisy, like noisy to the point where it was like them sounding like they were body slamming the floor and stuff, repeatedly, for like quite a while.

I let it go for a bit because I thought it was a phase or something, but then it started up like a week later, so I texted my landlord really nice reminding them to try to keep it quiet until like 10:30am, because of my sleep schedule being off because of my having a non-normal work schedule.

He said it was their son's online gym class on Mondays and Thursdays, and they'd figure something out.

Vegetable casualties...

 ...since I do my shopping like every 3-4 weeks with my little granny shopping cart to stock up so that I don't have to go to the store that often in the age of coronavirus:

1) A red pepper that had a little rotten patch develop at one end.

2) Heads of iceberg lettuce that had some outer leaves get gunky.

3) Two rotten potatoes at the bottom of like an eight- or a ten-pound bag.

4) Multiple cauliflower heads that started getting little black patches on the very outer tips of the florets here and there, where I'd have to scrape those places off with a knife before cooking them.

5) Scattered stalks of celery that get all weird greenish brown like a pervasive rot manifesting from underneath.

These are the fruits of caution, and the price I pay for safety, I think. It wouldn't be happening otherwise.

Anecdote of one resthome resident: A memorable pedestrian.

Last month, this one resthome resident who used to be a pediatric nurse was telling me about this one person she saw walk by the building the other day.

It was some guy in a wet Speedo, just walking down the sidewalk in that after he probably went swimming, all barefoot and with nothing else with him at all.

"How did he get into his apartment afterwards, if he didn't have keys?", I was like.

Rubbing alcohol competition.

Last month, the pharmacy near my house didn't have any rubbing alcohol, and so I left early for work the next day and got off the train a few stops south of the resthome, since there's a pharmacy right by the train station there and it's easy for me to get to.

When I got in, there was like two small bottles of 71% rubbing alcohol left on almost bare shelves, so I snatched them up.

As I was considering buying one of these overpriced small plastic spray bottles that came with some rubbing alcohol inside, these two (Latina) women, like a (middle-aged) woman and her (older) mom, they come by and snatch up a few of those small bottles, and they look and shake their heads at the empty shelves.

And then, this (tall) (young) (white) hipster guys comes up, and he doesn't see anything except those little spray bottles, but he hovers as the women leave, and then he darts down and looks all the way to the back of the bottom shelf, and he grabs a leftover regular-size rubbing alcohol bottle from somewhere way in back, where it had been out of the eyesight of all of us.

And, all of this happened in like two minutes.

If I had honestly gotten to the store like five minutes later, I wouldn't have gotten any rubbing alcohol at all.

At the checkout, too, the clerk told me you could only buy one bottle at a time or the system would lock, so he checked me out twice.

4 reactions to Trump getting Covid:

1) My one (blocky-built) (Tibetan) coworker said "Take care!" to me when we were leaving work at the resthome the other night, which is an unusual farewell greeting for her. 

2) People are wearing masks more on the subway.

3) After I told him that people are wearing masks more on the subway, my dad was like, "If that's what it takes for people to use common sense, then good deal."

4) One vivacious resident at the resthome was like, "At least we know now he's human."

Odd reaction to descriptions that I read in books.

Lately I've noticed that social distancing has become so ingrained, that some deeply submerged part of me crawls and writhes a little bit inside if I even read about some non-socially distanced activity.

Like for example, this past week I was finishing up Margaret Atwood's sequel to the Handmaid's Tale, and part of me crawled internally when they mentioned a choir concert/singalong in the closing pages, since it automatically seemed so inadvisable for you to go put yourself into that type of situation, even though the activity was described in fiction as part of a clearly fictional setting.

The same thing happened, too, when I was reading a book about the Jeffrey Epstein case, and the author described packing people into a larger courtroom for some important hearing involved with his case.