Seeing friends during Covid.

Last month, my one (straight) friend who's into BDSM was in town, so I met him on the back patio of a restaurant that I had heard ran things safely, and then afterwards I met my one art school colleague who wears (women's) clothes, since he lives close by to there and it made sense to double up on socialization.

My one (straight) friend who's into BDSM says the admin of the college where he teaches seems to be using Covid to shift more professors onto permanently teaching online, so he's feeling out whether he could do that one whole term a year, and then live elsewhere than his rural campus for like over half of the year.

My one art school colleague who wears (women's) clothes had to stop at a drugstore on his way to the bar, and he very kindly picked up an 8-pack of toilet paper for me, for which I picked up that much more of the bill, ultimately, as we had agreed upon.

We ordered deep-fried bar potato chips with this bowl of thick white clotty cheese sauce, and a thing of fries, too.

"All potatoes!", my one art school colleague was like.

Oddly, the bar had no menus, but instead a bar code that you had to scan with your phone to even look up the menu, for those people who know how to do that...

By that point we had moved inside and sat in a far corner of the bar far away from other people; we gamed out that it was probably safe, since it was early in the evening and not that many people had been in the bar all day, and the air capacity and flow seemed good, too, and so overall it didn't seem like someplace with a high viral load in the air.

On that note, my one (straight) friend who's into BDSM had said earlier that the city I live in does a lot better following general mask protocols, than the city on the Great Plains where his parents live and where he had visited them earlier this year after quarantining for 2 weeks like you're supposed to do.

Black-on-black hatred.

Every once in a while at the resthome when the topic of crime here in the city comes up, my one (edgy) (Ethiopian) coworker is like, "I hate black people," and from the way she says it and how often she brings it up, you can tell it's something that she says at least partially to push boundaries and maybe to push people's buttons, too.

Anyhow, the other week she talked more about how she used to work as a parking lot attendant at a parking garage downtown, and how 3 times she got robbed.

"What was the race of the robbers?", I was like.

"All black," she was like. "I hate black people."

Then, she told me that one day this (black) lawyer, "very dark skin," who came in to park a lot asked her why she didn't ever say hi back to him, when he said hi to her.

"He say, 'Did black people rob you?', and I say yes, and he say, 'I understand,' he say that, 'I understand.'"

And, she told that to me like it simply proved her point, forever.

. . .

(Tibetan) New Year tidbit.

Back in January, my one (quieter) (Tibetan) coworker at the resthome asked me to fill in for her one day in mid-February, and it was only the day before that when I was at the resthome and I had mentioned to someone that I was filling in, that they were like, "Oh yeah, they're all doing that, it's Tibetan New Year's this weekend."

So, I googled and it turns out that they were right, and so I texted a Tibetan New Year's greeting to all of my coworkers who I had in my phone contacts.

And, my one (male) (Tibetan) coworker who no longer works at the resthome and I ended up chit-chatting and catching up some by text, and he even sent me a very cute picture of how big his son is getting.

And so after that for like the next week, here and there I showed the baby picture to a few coworkers who know him, and they were all like, "Oh wow, he is getting so big!"

And then, when I showed the picture to my one (older) (stockier) (Tibetan) coworker, she was like, "Oh, he looks like the mother, that is nice, light skin."

More food strategization methods.

A big part of my food strategization to avoid going to the grocery store during Covid is my trying to plan ahead for my having salads as long as possible.

The last time that I went to the store, romaine lettuce and kale was on sale, so I got three of each, to use the romaine first, and then the kale, since kale keeps longer and freshens up in a vinegar dressing even if it gets dried out first, since it can soak in the vinegar at the bottom of the bowl and through that it softens up.

I also got a lot of beets, since you can boil beets and then cube them and then combine them with raw onions and vinegar for a nice salad, and that's full of vitamins, and beets keep forever and you can just keep them in the bottom drawer of your fridge, and even if they get moldy, you can cut the moldy pieces of skin off with a potato peeler, easy.

Also, since I taped packages of spaghetti and linguine together to make weights to use for my daily ten-minute coronavirus workout, I always have it in the back of my mind that if I ever need pasta, I can always disassemble one of my weights.

More Covid fallout in higher education.

At my last employer in higher education, freshman writing classes were allocated first to current students and then to graduates, probably to avoid unionization and labor issues by having teachers maximally also be students.

It was the way admin mandated it, but at least the immediate supervisors were transparent and nice, and they did what they could to be fair. It was what it was.

Anyhow, the last term of the year almost always had less sections offered, usually to the point where only current students could teach, not graduates.

This year an email went out...  There's probably going to be only **two** sections available! TWO! For everyone!

What a f*cking mess.

How can students who are just scraping by anyways going to make up that money?

In the current way so many jobs are structured, people really are disposable.

Food cravings, and tastiness.

A few weeks ago the day after I caught up with a few friends, I had the strongest craving for oranges when I woke up groggily mid-morning, and then again when I finally got up.

So, I cut up 2 nice oranges I had in my fridge, and I had them with breakfast.

It's so strange to have food cravings like that; when I was actually having the oranges, it was like they were exactly what my body needed, and I just couldn't get enough of them.

Something else I'm into this winter though it doesn't rise to the level of a craving is salted butter on toasted cinnamon raisin bread.

I've always had that as a snack, but now for some reason I'm less about the bread, and more about biting into the salty fatty room-temperature butter sitting out on top of the bread.

Every time I bite into it, I'm always like, "This is so good!"

Things breaking down: CD cases.

 Like two times during the past five or six weeks, I was putting CDs into my player in my living room to listen to them, and while I was doing that I accidentally dropped the case.

Both times, the case landed just the right way where the outer hinge flew off one edge of the case, so now I have 2 broken CD cases where you can cover up the CD and shelve it but the outer cover comes off if you try to open up the case.

One of the CDs is Madonna's MDNA, and the other one is something else.