1) I was able to roll out of bed a bit after 8am and score an appointment at the DMV later that morning to update the address on my driver's license, so I had some coffee and got going and hopped off the cross-town bus at a run-down donut place a few blocks away from there, and I got two shitty cake donuts from a (thin) (older) (Chinese?) man, though the name of the business was "[A hispanic woman's first name]'s Donuts." At the strip mall DMV, there was still Juneteenth decorations up along the Plexiglass dividers along the counter, including one that said something like "FREE-ISH SINCE 1865."
2) On campus later, I early voted and then went to take care of some stuff at the university library, where suddenly when I was about to emerge from the stacks and do check-out, I realized that I didn't have my library card, so I had to retrace my steps across multiple floors and then I found it laying out on a shelf near where I had first stopped to get a book and had paused there to flip through some volumes (I must have been holding it and set it down there, while I was looking at the books?). At the scanning station there that people without a job there can use, there was a (shorter) (cleancut) (older) (white) man who was doing voluminous scanning, and he politely stepped aside so I could scan my two short articles and my one short book chapter.
"If my meter ran over, it's already happened by now, so it doesn't matter," he was like.
He was an ethnomusicologist who's done work on Africa, he said, and he too had an independent scholars affiliation, and lived in a nearby town.
3) After that, I popped by a (Palestinian-run) shawarma place where the (dark) (young) (virile) counter workers were familiar and handsy with each other and I got a huge spicy chicken wrap that I ate outside at a patio and got slightly queasy from, both because of the spices on the chicken and the fact that it was like a steamy ninety-some degree day (I had thought that the yogurt sauce would balance out the spices on the chicken, but they just didn't). By the end, I had like two to three bites left of the spicy chicken wrap and I just couldn't down it without vomiting, so I halfheartedly re-wrapped it up in the bottom of the metallic wrapper and I tucked it into a side pocket in my bag, only to take it out like 40 minutes later and eat it after I had downed a lot of Slurpee knock-off that I had gotten from a gas station that's on the way back to my apartment, which is something that I sometimes do, even though the Slurpee knock-off comes in a styrofoam cup, which I hate.
3) In my one "academic summer bookclub" phone conference later that day with my one (Mormon) colleague, he mentioned the existence of some gnostic texts where Jesus details how he superintended the conception of each of the 12 apostles.
At that, I started laughing ruefully.
"Sounds like a post-Roe v. Wade world," I was like, and he didn't laugh, but he didn't disagree, either.
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