On reading (1 of 4): A sad situation.

This summer I was talking with a (Caribbean) acquaintance who was finishing her Ph.D., and I mentioned some book that I had been reading for fun.

"I wish I had time to read for fun," she was like, sighing.

. . .

How sad is that, that people supposedly leading the intellectual life, don't have time to read broadly.

Spicy food.

Last month at the resthome, my one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker was saying that she had been cooking a lot on her day off, so I asked her what she was making, and she told me about some tostadas thing with red sauce and spicy peppers.

"But I thought that you don't like spicy food," I was like.

"Noooo," she was like, "I love spicy food, but spicy food does not love me," and she held her stomach as she said that last part.

She then explained that in so many words that she felt lucky, so that's why she decided to try cooking up some spicy food.

We then went on to talking about tortillas, and out-of-the-blue she started praising this one local brand that everyone talks about as being exactly like homemade, and she said that it was exactly like you'd get if you made them at home in Mexico.

I said then that's the brand I get if the store has them, and I keep some frozen in my freezer to take out whenever I need them to thaw out and eat as a snack with hot sauce, and she said that she didn't know that you could freeze tortillas like that.

I also mentioned another local brand that I had tried and didn't like so much, and she was, "The taste is weird with those, I don't like them."

A very weird dream of a music concert.

Earlier this month I dreamnt -

I'm in like a lobby somewhere with my mother, and I suddenly realize that Katy Perry's "Smile" tour isn't being cancelled because of coronavirus but is somehow still pressing on in revised form, and I'm being pressured by mother into attending even though I have this huge sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach about going because of coronavirus.

Next, we're inside and at the back of what's like a large dinner theater room with these big round tables with white tables cloths on them and there's like red curtains and an elegant carpet, only, there's like two seats at every table towards the back and facing the stage because of distancing, and here and there there's like these gigantic solid cuts of meats shaped almost like a gyro stack but like three or four feet high, just sitting there on the table with slices cut off of them, since that was one of the dinner entrees that you could order.

Except, we don't order, and even though that's technically allowed, I still feel very uncomfortable, because everyone else got the dinner theater ticket or whatever.

Next, Katy Perry sings with minimal accompaniment, and then everything flashes forward and my eyesight is no longer located in my conscious head, and I can see a room where the tables are cleared and there's a small group of people clustered together up towards the front of the stage, with this one (middle-aged) (geeky) (black) woman shrieking along to the climactic chorus of some song, to where it's impossible to hear anything else.

And, even though I'm not in that room, I keep thinking that this isn't good with coronavirus precautions.

And then, I wake up.

. . .

Wart confusion.

My wart on the web of skin between my righthand thumb and my righthand forefinger reappeared, so I've been using wart remover on it to try to burn it off gradually and get rid of it all over again, like I had done so many years ago.

After a certain point, however, it seems like the skin gets bulky when you try rolling it between your fingers, so you're not sure if the core of the wart is still there at all, or if it's just your skin getting all leathery and bulking up from being abused after all the repeated exposure to the acid.

A dream of something wrong, again, as always.

Like last month I dreamnt-

Somehow (I can't quite recall all of the details right now, and I'm not sure I ever will), my Blackwell's Handbook of Dialectology was missing, permanently.

And then, I woke up.

. . .

An achievement against my deep-seated environmental neuroticism: More paper waste.

I'm very proud that it's been like a year now that I track my research and writing hours and whatnot and that the sheets of paper I keep gumtacked on my wall in my living room I only use on one side, because I'm afraid that if I flipped them over and used them again that marks from the previous side would come off onto the wall as I wrote on the new side.

For me, throwing away that used up sheet of paper after each month is done is really an achievement.

Apartment drama: Burnt popcorn.

Like a month ago, I was making myself some popcorn as a snack, and I wasn't watching and it got really burnt all of a sudden, to the point where it smoked and you could see a haze in my apartment afterwards.

Like five or six hours afterwards, I pick up my phone, and it was a text from my landlord wanting to know if I had turned the heat on for the year or something and if everything was all right (he and his family live upstairs from me, though they're considerate and not nosy at all).

I texted him back right away that I had had my phone off and that I had only just gotten his text just then, and I said that it wasn't my turning the heat on, it was burnt popcorn.

He texted back and said that he thought that it had smelled like popcorn.