A consequence of Covid deaths.

The other week on the phone, my mother shared that she had found out that it's taking national financial places like 3-6 weeks to process estate paperwork when people die, there's so much demand and there's such a big backlog from all the ongoing Covid deaths.

Dream (2 of 2): Stubby library pencil.

Last month I dreamnt-

I'm using a stubby library pencil like you can get from pencil holders by library catalog computers, and all of a sudden I realize that it should be in the make-up kit of two people standing by me, who are standing there doing their make-up.

And then, I wake up.

. . .

(I was looking for a pencil in my house that month and I could only find a stubby library pencil, so that fact must have been rattling around in my head when I was dreaming that night.)

Dream (1 of 2): Flossing, and a boat.

Last month I dreamnt-

I'm flossing, but my teeth are incredibly long, like six or eight inches, and they're brittle and yellow with multiple gaps in them that get upwards of a quarter of an inch at most, and the only thing holding them together as individual teeth is the roots, which are like fuzzy rough twine made up of natural materials, and you can see that just sticking out in the gaps, and I'm afraid that putting the floss in between the teeth will make them break apart some and take huge chunks of the enamel out.

I later begin looking for my luggage, and I emerge onto a veranda on the front of a boat, and my one art school colleague who wears (women's) clothes is there and and shows me where my luggage is, that he was keeping it safe up on this large broad space above the veranda up back towards the upper deck and captain's cabin, and there's a decent amount of other luggage up there, too, when I look.

The boat is cruising into the fork of a broad river with high cliffs and fall foliage, apart from the fork itself, where it's a faintly wooded meadow sloping down to a boathouse from up by where a house is, and there's a wood-slatted path between them.

There's also a carved gate in one cliff at water level and we near it as a sight, curving over towards it in a broad and leisurely swoop.

. . .

Snow, horrible snow.

During that same period of snow in the city, my one (male) (Filipino) coworker spent the night at the resthome, since he was working one evening shift and then was set to come back in the next morning.

Usually when he does that, he just goes home and then comes back again, since he lives a straight shot west of the resthome by bus.

But, the bus ride in that day had taken him over an hour-and-a-half! That's how much snow there was, interrupting the traffic and making the bus go slow and whatnot.

It's funny, I live further away geography-wise from the resthome, but because I commute in by subway and not by bus, I actually live around the same distance away timewise if not actually closer, sometimes.

Snow, wonderful snow.

Last month, the city I live in got a wonderful amount of snow.

One day it started really coming down on an afternoon when I was on shift at the resthome, and it continued right through when I left work and got home that night.

When I was getting ready to go to bed at like 3am, I decided to peek out my front windows, and it was the most marvelous thing; there was like easily a full foot, foot-and-a-half of snow out on the sidewalk and the steps to my house, completely covering over where I had come through walking my bike back from the subway stop like three or four hours before.

It was just mounds of snow, completely smooth, and no trace of me at all, though I'd just been there.

Astounding!

Random chit-chat of one newer resthome resident.

There's this one newer resthome resident who's in her 100s and talks about the most random things, but I rarely ever assist her, though in the last month I not only got to, I was actually assigned to her to help her for the entire shift.

She always talks a little loud and a bit slow, and you never really know where the conversation is going.

On the day when I worked with her, when I popped in to check on her after lunch, she talked about how there was pasta for lunch and pasta in the soup for dinner, so it was just pasta all the time.

"I had three sons and I always fed them meat," she was like. "Big, strong boys. I bought a quarter of a cow."

Later, she was talking about her youngest son 'David' and she was like, "He was a king, but he was also a sinner. He killed a woman's husband, but he was still king."

Rabelais.

I'm reading Rabelais in bursts, and though so many of the jokes only probably work in French and are highly referential, I still love it.

Like, he has a chapter about why the walls of Paris should be built out of prostitutes' c*nts (answer: what else could better withstand pounding from soldiers' weapons?), and then he also has this joke that revolves around different ways to translate this particular verb form that you find in Hebrew.

The critical apparatus says to think of his work as having the high-and-low Carnival atmosphere of Mardi Gras, and I think that's right.

It's totally like the totally socially-accepted vulgar shit that you see coming out of parade floats in New Orleans, like how my one friend with the cat who now lives there was telling me about this one float she saw with Bobby Jindal, where he had his pants down around his ankles and was ass-fucking a pelican ( = the state bird and thus a symbol of Louisiana).