Odd-for-me grocery habits.

Lately I've been occasionally buying the occasional (organic) gallon of (2%) milk, and a few weeks ago I used a coupon to get some (locally-made) cheddar at the local co-op, too.

I did that years ago with (locally-made) cheese in another city that I was temporarily living in for the summer, but I can't remember the last time I bought milk even semi-regularly, if I've ever even done that.

It really goes to show what a tight budget I lived on, for so long...  I really don't have the living space or habits of a "normal" person.

New neighbor update.

Since I met him, I've seen my new neighbor a few more times, the small streaked-fur brown-and-light-brown bunny who is very small, and who doesn't know how to behave yet.

One afternoon I look out my window because a small movement catches my eye, and there he is by the firepit in the backyard.

Then, suddenly, he bolts, as a large-ish grey squirrel languidly hops towards him and gets like four feet away from where he is, like reaching right by where he was, like twenty seconds after he's gone.

Another time, too, I go outside one afternoon as I'm talking on the phone, and there he is, and he looks at me and he just stays there, even though I came out to like within six feet of where he is.

Then, suddenly, like a minute later as I'm still standing there in the same position as where I had stopped right when I came out, he bolts, since I guess something freaked him out at that point, though damned if I know what it was.

Somehow I feel that it's animals like him who got close to humans to the point where it led to domestication, if they survived.

Update on my tennis shoes that I bought around the turn of the year:

The bottom is starting to wear through, on the sole and the heel, I do that much walking every shift at work.

I really don't wear them anywhere else, either.

Addendum.

I forgot --

When I was talking to my one (longer haired) and (less jumpy) front neighbor about employment stuff, too, I mentioned the pessimism on undergraduate career prospects, from some local guy who teaches at the local business school.

"Fuck those people," he was like, automatically, without even listening to what I was saying.

So, I let that pass by, and I explained what I was saying, again, that even the business school didn't seem to be a good return, and the people who taught there recognized it.

Then, he seemed to realize he was reacting to something else, and mumbled something about how he thought I was talking about computer sci people, and though he didn't quite say it, you could tell he just took glee that even the computer sci people were running into trouble with employment, more.

On college and employment (2 of 2): A path forward?

At the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, there's this (mildly lower class) (white) couple who I recognize from them being in a few times, a (bigger) guy with a beard that shoots out all over his face in big tufts, and this (smaller) (thinner) (drawn face) (younger-mom-with-kids-at-home-looking) lady.

And, we were chit-chatting, and it turns out that the guy had worked in restaurants as a chef for years, and then someone he knew had gotten out of it and into industrial solar, and he basically could go through training and start right away, and now he's making like $65 an hour doing multiple jobs, primarily surveying and staking out the postholes where they put in the stands for the panels.

And, it was all around the area, so you don't have to commute far, and they didn't work you to death with overtime, and training was like one town over in some conference center in a (notoriously rundown) (nearby) town.

So, I got his email for my neighbor, who had also been telling me that he was looking for something more outside that might be good.

"And do they drugtest?", I was like, mentioning that that was important to my neighbor, since he was a recreational marijuana user.

"No," the guy was like, and he said he smoked too.

"No way," I was like.

So, like the next day or maybe the day after, I handed that information off to my neighbor, and he was impressed that it seemed quick and that training was nearby, and he said that he had been thinking of looking into trades classes at the nearby community college.

I also said that the guy had said that some people he knows do windmill tech, and that that supposedly pays like $80 an hour after you get your thousand hours in at like $25 an hour during your apprenticeship.

. . .

(Just think of this, by the way, that here you have a kid going to a top-tier nationally-known school with everything paid for, and he's still so dispirited about the economy, and couldn't figure out a path forward in college over the span of multiple years as things were falling apart, and he has now been looking to bus driving and air traffic control and now maybe trades... Just not good.)

On college and employment (1 of 2): A backstory.

The other week I had been reading out on the porch of the fronthouse in the one (college) town where I live now, and I ended up chit-chatting some with one of the upstairs neighbors, the (longer-haired) and (less jumpy) one.

Basically, he did end up graduating, and he had quit his job at a local national retailer a few months ago so he could take a short international vacation for a few weeks, and now he's back to looking for a job again.

He had gotten into retail through warehouse work during the pandemic, and then entered a managerial role where he was making $23 an hour, but he was saying that all his friends he had worked with had left, and there was no reason to keep on.

"You always have to quit and go somewhere else to make more money," he was like, and he was telling me that he had seen a few long-term employees who had managed to rack up like $3 more an hour from multiple raises, only to have wage inflation mean that new hires were suddenly making as much as them, but their wages never changed, despite that.

He was also saying that city bus drivers can make it good -- his dad is one and has put his years in and can now pull in over $120K with overtime -- and that maybe he would be an air traffic controller for a few years, and grab that money and then get out.

"So did you graduate?", I was like, and he said that yes, he had, the last semester, finally.

(A while ago he had told me that his degree really didn't do anything, but he was committed to getting around to graduating, so his grandmother could see him.)

I also asked just a little bit, and it turns out that he did bio because he thought it might get him somewhere but he didn't really like it that much, and then he kept applying for internships and kept getting turned down and so he could never get a lab job, and then after a while he just stopped applying by like his second or third year, and a bio degree like he has is pretty useless without lab experience, but he finished to finish, especially since he had this "college prepayment" thing from his dad where back in the late 1990s his dad had paid like ten thousand dollars down, and that meant all his college was paid for now, even for his degree that doesn't really do anything.

"It's just so freeing to give up," he was like.

And, I had to agree.

And, I told him the multiple professions where I had had leads or had made inroads or had tried to configure and reconfigure to maybe get somewhere, and how it was just endless frustration, and then wage compression and short staffing in eldercare was just horrible to find yourself in the middle of, especially realizing that it wasn't coming back on any timescale where you could salvage a decent job like you had anticipated when you had gotten into it going on 5-6 years ago, now.

And, when I listed the different type of jobs where I had had leads or had made inroads into over the course of like twelve years, he just gave this sharp dark laugh and was like, "Those are all the areas where they don't need anyone."

. . .

(I did agree with his sentiment, though I mildly corrected him, saying that you could walk out the door right now and get jobs there, they just worked you to death for no money and no real sure advancement, and so weren't worth having.)

A dream of something slightly off.

The other week I dreamnt -

I'm somewhere reclining on my side a bit like a (Roman) would eat on a triclinium, and my mouth is half open and my orange-flavored fish oil capsules that I take pretty regularly for health reasons are starting to melt in my mouth, and I can taste this oily and somewhat orange flavor start to pervade my mouth...

And then, I wake up.

. . .

(My fish oil capsules really are orange flavored, but I've never actually kept the gel cap in my mouth long enough for it to dissolve through so I can discover what's inside and what it tastes like.)

Separate genesis of ideas.

The other day at work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker told me that her and my (new-ish) (younger) (tall) (Thai) coworker had been talking about (South Asian from South Asia) customers, and they had agreed that they probably were so badly behaved because of the caste system.

"No way," I was like, and then I told her that I had been thinking the very same thing, a while ago.

And, we talked about how often one requests something like a mug of hot water, and then after you bring that someone else makes a request for the very same thing, and then after you bring more a third time someone else wants some too, and they do this even if you check each time if anyone else wants anything else, and even if you confirm immediately afterward that you only need to bring like one whatever to the table.

"But it could be the caste system in a different way," I was like, then, floating the idea that it's not some entitled behavior because they know they're from a rich person caste, but rather because maybe back home in (India) people from the servant-whatever caste don't dare push back even tactfully like a waiter would here, when they ask if anyone else needs anything else. And so, their bad behavior goes unchecked and gets ingrained.

At least, that was my idea.

Two recent doings at work...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) The one (new) (Chinese-American) server who's been a hostess before but not a server was like, "Yeah, there really are cultural differences in how people behave," and she was telling me that she was frustrated at this table of mostly (South Asian from South Asia) (undergraduate age) students and a few (South Asian-American) (undergraduate age) students, because they were all talking over one another and not really responding to her when she was trying to finalize their order, as they kept the one menu out on the table maybe for later, like people from that culture(s?) often do.

2) During a slow day, I taught my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker and my one (younger) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker Exquisite Corpse, and we took turns passing each other the little drawings that we were making on the back of old receipts that we keep under the counter and staple together to make the little booklets that we take customers' orders in.

And, when I told my one (younger) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker in (Spanish) that Frida Kahlo played this game, her eyes got big for a second and she was like, "Ohhhhhhhhhhhh," and you could tell that she was very pleased that we were doing something that Frida Kahlo had also done.

(My one [chubby] [Thai] coworker didn't know who Frida Kahlo is.)

A few of our drawings were quite good, but we had miscommunicated and so the top person had drawn down through the neck to the shoulders, and then the person below them had started with the neck and then drawn a second set of shoulders again, and together it just looked off.

So, when my one (younger) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker was saying that we had done really a good job on two of them, I pointed that out and said it didn't look right, and she was like, Hmmph, and then it was like a lightbulb went off and she suddenly took those two drawings and folded them to hide the second set of neck and shoulders, and then the drawings really looked stellar.

Preliminary finding response...

...to my giant discovery:

1) Hundreds of hits to my short blogpost and a minor uptick in activity to a few of my professional webpages;

2) A couple questions on social media (one which seemed to minimize what I did a bit, and which blew past a distinction that I had forcefully introduced and should have already been intelligible to anyone who's done work in the language);

3) A comment on social media from a guy who studies a different branch of the same language family, where he says the overall finding makes intuitive sense from what we know of other related languages;

4) Some new social media followers, mostly randos but maybe like one grad student at a top program; and

5) No real discernible reaction from people inside the "profession" itself.

My guess is that anyone inside the profession is sitting tight and biting their tongue, and don't know what to make of it, to the extent that anyone has noticed.

It's like they're all looking for cues on what to believe, though, G-dd-ss help them, I don't know if the people they're looking towards have done the baseline necessary work to build the minimal skillsets to offer a competent evaluation.

A springtime diversion.

As everything is blooming, with sprouts and bulbs and buds of light green filling the trees, I'm looking for the first signs of what I call "the demon trees," that is, that invasive species "the tree of heaven" that's everywhere around me and which my landlord removed a big one of them from the yard by my cottage like last year or maybe two years ago.

There, the bark around the stump is rotting and starting to peel away, and I can already easily kick some off, after the winter.

And, though it was sending out shoots last year, this year there don't appear to be any, yet.

But, like last week, I had the curtain open in my kitchen, and looking out into my neighbor's yard where there's an old falling-apart garage that no-one uses, I could see the outlines of the thin long woody shoots of the demon trees that have grown up by its walls over the past several years, and the very tippy-tops of them seem to be throwing off their palm-fronds, again.

Permission to pass by in (Spanish)...

...that I said the other day to my one (shorter) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker, as she was doing stuff at the end of the night at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, as she was standing kind of in the middle of the main but tight kitchen entrance corridor holding a small but deep metal pan full of rice:

"Permiso, la mujer con el riso" ('Excuse me, the lady with the rice')

. . .

(In retrospect, I should have made it rhyme more and given it a little bit more of a beat, and been like, "Permiso permiso, la mujer con el riso.")

Addendum.

I was talking about my new skincare routine with my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker.

She says sunscreen is important.

On health and beauty:

1) Since I had COVID last fall, it's only been the past month that I can do two intensive twelve-minute home workouts on adjacent days, consistently, and it's only been like the past couple of weeks that I've started up a short weekly jog again, like I had started doing towards the end of last summer until I came down with it.

2) Besides my occasional zinc supplement like I've been taking for years, I've started fish oil and calcium multiple times a week, as precautions, and every other day I now do a major skincare thing, like alternating exfoliant or retinol, alternating, in addition to careful facewashing and lotion, daily, plus sunscreen if I'll be out in the sun some, though probably not as much as I should be doing.

3) I special-ordered a 25-pound bag of organic short-grain brown rice from the local hippie co-op, to start using sometimes instead of the standard white rice that I've always eaten at home, to draw down the amount of overall white rice that I'm eating and the effect that that's having on my whatever-the-f*ck-have-you-they-are levels, which I guess are less than ideal.

Another pandemic mental barrier overcome.

I feel like that in the past month people have overcome yet another collective mental barrier, and have put yet more of the pandemic behind us.

It's like people are behaving more normally somehow, yet again, and it's somehow everywhere all at once.

I was mentioning this to the one (white) (short) (round-faced) (college-age) (frizzy-haired) (spiritually wearing a pussy protest hat) bartender at the local brewery, too, and she was saying that she's felt the exact same thing, and that multiple, multiple people have actually been making that same observation, like the past couple weeks.

Another dream.

The other week I dreamnt --

I am in a small industrial kitchen with some of coworkers from the (resthome) where I used to work at, and there's no windows or natural light, and there's like a shiny off-whiteish cinderblock wall on one side, and a metal serving tray industrial cooking contraption on the other, and as we're all in there doing our random work, suddenly my one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker walks through the middle of us, and she is dressed like the rest of us in simple black pants and non-descript kitchen work tops, and as she passes through us, we all slowly stop, and then I look at one or two of my (Tibetan) coworkers and they are absolutely frozen stock-still and their eyes are just big, and I know what I have to do, and I follow her into the dry storage room, where she is doing something among the shelves.

"What you doing?", I'm like.

"What do you think I'm doing?", she says, not even looking at me, but just continuing to do the tasks that she's doing, "I'm working."

"You are dead now," I'm like, kindly but firmly. "You are dead now. You can move on."

. . .

(. . .)

Bits of three recent broken dreams from different nights:

1) I'm in my bathroom staring at myself in the mirror, and I have (shockingly white) (deeply bleached-blonde) hair; and

2) I'm walking around the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, singing Joni Mitchell's "Carey," and somehow it's a karaoke situation, only somehow it's just me there, with no microphone or anything, and there is no backing track playing; and

3) I am outside my body and looking at myself reading a magazine languidly and flipping pages (and then I jolt out of sleep and I realize that although I was supposed to be reading the magazine in my dream, the me that I was staring at was flipping the pages in the wrong direction than you would in reality).

. . .

My new neighbor:

A small streaked-fur brown-and-light-brown bunny, that is very small, and doesn't know how to behave yet.

I have seen him out by the small woodpile in the backyard outside my cottage, in the middle of the afternoon, just sitting there, munching.

And, one late afternoon I went to close my window that looks out on the alley, and he scampered out from the small patch of grass directly beneath it and ran across the gravel and went and hid underneath a car parked out by the house opposite.

Like, he just doesn't get that you're supposed to take better cover, or only come out at dusk or dawn or whatever.

I hope he survives.

Solution:

So, I rush-published my big finding, putting it out there in multiple places in order to minimize disputes about the date and "who got there first."

I had wanted to keep it under wraps until some big party, but it really freaked me out that that one guy online was asking *smart* questions showing that he was doubting the current paradigm of explaining things...

Once you get there, you get there fast, and it all comes at once, and I've just put too much work in to have someone else swoop in, even with some half-articulated sh*t on social media.

So, for now at least, it's done.

My heart skipped a beat.

Over social media, I saw that someone was using one particular vocab word in relation to the forms that are the heart of my "Great Big Idea."

I quickly searched their history and they have mentioned a few things over the past three years, but they don't seem to be doing intensive research, or have had the same breakthrough.

It has scared me sh*tless.

Lately, I have had the oddest feeling of being pursued by death.

Lately, I have had the oddest feeling of being pursued by death. Like, it's like somehow looking out at me from small everyday places and I always have to be on guard, lest it creeps out and comes and takes me away unawares, and I am done.

Like, I watch carefully now when I cross the street, or when I go to my cottage door at night, or when I take out the trash into the back alley at the end-of-shift at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now.

It's like at any moment something could happen, if I'm not careful.

I feel like this is all tied into my one big discovery that I made with the one ancient language that I've been studying intensively for several years, now.

It's almost like I'm giving intellectual birth, and I'm in this liminal vulnerable place until the process and the project reach completion enough.

It really is the strangest feeling.

Unbelievable safety incident a few weeks ago...

...in the city that I used to live in, where there was a mid-afternoon weekday shooting a few blocks from where my one (half Sudanese) (half British) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair) lives with her family, and about which we were texting when she said:

Yeh everyone in my building heard the shots. I was still downtown.

-- and --

My neighbor had just left the house with her kids (both under 5) to go for a walk. Apparently the gunman drove down the section of our one-way street the wrong way and almost crashed twice into cars going the other way.

. . .

(. . .)

A complex of mine with spoiling avocados:

I must eat them, and I mask the fruity, slightly rotting smell by putting more salt and raw onion than usual on the toast.

Turkey-broth.

At a certain point when you boil a turkey-carcass, there's just little bits left that get picked up by your spoon and stuff when you go to strain it, like little vertabra with cartilage all around, and bits of skin that float up to the top and roll with the boils.

It's all very primal, to have this dismembered animal sitting there stewing in your pot, becoming less and less of a thing over the hours, as you pick off it forgotten jagged bits of meat that have tensed up and now stick up off the bones.

Posterity (2 of 2): People who are gone.

It's very odd to think of all the people who are gone -- my grandparents, my great aunt, other people in my life who I've known -- and to think that here I am probably on the verge of some great achievement where my name will always be remembered, and they never knew me for that, at all.

It's almost like I'm another person, now, and some great curtain had fallen and cut off their perception of me, and who I became.

Posterity (1 of 2): Party.

Because of my huge discovery with the one (ancient) language that I've been studying for years, I'm thinking more and more that I'm going to synch things up and throw a party, where I pay for catering and some beverages and then give a local lecture to debut my findings, with the blogposts synched up with social media to "go live" shortly after I finish telling everybody "what's what."

I mean, why not, this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing -- that is, if someone somehow doesn't get to the idea first before me by the end of this year, though that's difficult to fathom happening.

Like, if I was a professor at a university, all their PR flaks would be jizzing themselves to throw me on the cover of their alumni magazine and they'd be sending press releases out non-stop to top major news outlets, I'd imagine, like, it's just that big.

So, I might as well celebrate.

Somehow this whole "DIY" aspect to my discovery makes it all even more obscene; the only thing worse than them not knowing this all the time everyone's been studying the language, is for someone from outside the field and even from outside a university to come in and correct them all, like everyone ever who's put their hand to it.

Just obscenity piled on obscenity.

Two random happenings:

1) I walk home on a rainy afternoon, and underneath a table that sits out in the backyard where my one front neighbor sometimes rests houseplants in summer, there is like a brown dough-nut, the dough-nut  itself being the dry area of open dirt underneath the round table, and the dough-nut's hole being the small hole in the table's center where you can stick an umbrella, which had let the rain through and so had dampened a small circle right smack-dab in the middle of the dough-nut of dry dirt.

2) As I go to brew some coffee in my little stove-top espresso maker while I heat up some water on the stovetop, the smell of the ground coffee suddenly combines with the smell of something burning on the burner to briefly create a smell like shit, but only briefly.

Recreating natural phenomena, indoors.

The other week I found several inordinately large dustballs inside my little cottage, one by the eastern wall of my bedroom, and two others by the long eastern wall of my living room.

Even though I had recently dusted, I suddenly realized that airing out my house on a warm windy day had led to little tumbleweed-like things being whirled around and swept up inside and shoved against the far wall, in the direction that the wind was blowing.

Two gentle jokes at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) To a table of three (Iranian?) (graduate student types?) who are semi-regular customers, and the female of whom has dyed her hair blue:

Me (to her with concern, after checking with the table in general if everything is okay with their entrees): 

"Are you really sure your food is okay? Your hair turned blue!"

. . .

(Later when they leave, I apologize for our kitchen being radioactive, and its turning her hair blue.)

. . .

2) To a large table of 2 (South Asian) families, to whom I had already shared my joke about the blue hair, after I had made it at the other table:

Me (to the [skinny] [fairly dark] [young] boy, who had wolfed down the dessert that they had let him order): "Wow, you really finished that! You are the smallest one here, but you eat the most!"

. . .

(That last joke got peals of laughter from the [South Asian] adults, especially the mother, who cast me a lasting endearing glance. Gentle humor works so well with them.)

Two recent happenings:

1) At the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, the outdoors signboard with the opening hours and the indoors signboard with the specials have both been rewritten and redone, each with special art drawn by the (oldest) daughter of my one (new) (tall) (Thai) coworker, who is in (later) elementary school and who really likes to draw and who is always sketching and stuff.

2) After noticing a (giant) smashed cricket in my bathroom and kicking it into the corner to sweep it up when I go to clean my apartment the next day, I finally do go to sweep it up, and when I move it, there's a burst of like fifteen to twenty ants moving away from the insect-corpse and fleeing towards a crack in the wall, from their having been eating on some moist bits still left in its insides somewhere, probably.

Philip Glass.

I do like him.

I recently got a double CD set of his opera "Akhnaten," and I had heard it before over the radio and it's not all that, but it does have some good stuff, and I'm not averse to it, overall.

The best part might be the funeral scene, though, which is "lit," as the kids say.

His music really can just make you pay attention and get into this hypnotic groove. It like brings you into the present and you can't turn away.

A return to where I live now:

1) I come home late at night after a vacation, and as I walk around the side of the house to go up front to the front porch to get all of my accumulated mail, I see a cluster of something white a few feet off the ground way up in front of me amidst all of the shadows and black, and as I get closer, I suddenly realize that it's spring daffodils, bloomed since I had left.

2) When I give a personally gift-wrapped bottle of special fruit wine to my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker, she starts tearing up, and after I give two jars of special fruit jams and preserves to my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones, I find out that though she likes baking and sweet stuff, she doesn't like jellies and jams, and so I think and then I tell her to give them back to me and I'll keep them around my house to give to other people later, and I'll go get her another replacement gift like dried fruit, which she does like and she does eat, she says, and so I also tell her to forget that I ever asked her what kind of gift she would like and would actually use.

So, she gives me back the 2 jars of special fruit and then I'm like, "And what did I tell you to forget?", and she looks at me and is like, "What? I don't know, I don't remember," and I'm like, "Exactly."

Potential St. Patrick's Day celebration...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

It's St. Patrick's Day and I'm chit-chatting with this (chill) (younger middle-aged) (white) couple who I recognize by face, and the (blonde pulled-back hair) (woman) starts saying that the restaurant should do something to celebrate, and between the two of us, we arrive at the idea of creating a new dish "Paddy Thai," where it's like Pad Thai, only the noodles are dyed green.

"Or the meat, like green eggs and ham," she was like.

Addendum, on declining financial returns for a university education.

My one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair) already said a while back now that the educational system in the West will truly fall apart when it's the MBAs and the MDs who can't make any money.

They're like the two last redoubts where the assumption of massive payback is unassailable, and once they're severely eroding or mostly gone and those grads are stuck with the debt, there's nothing left to say or to hope for, and everything will truly be gone.

More signs of major economic problems:

1) When I told my one friend from high school who's run a domestic violence shelter that I crunched the numbers from my W2 and that my server job would be equivalent to a $45K+ a year professional job if I was working full-time, she said that she's seen any number of non-profit jobs that pay less than that for initial low-level positions, and they all require master's degrees.

2) On a recent train trip back to the one college town that I now live in, the person next to me on the sold-out train was a(n undergrad), and he said he's doing food manufacturing science or whatever since he likes to cook and it was something that seems to make sense to get into.

He also said that most of his friends are doing stuff like electrical engineering, but it's hit or miss, and a number of them are getting worried since they aren't getting internships like they're supposed to, and are having trouble finding traction with initial jobs.

"Really?", I was like, and so I mentioned that a friend of my one (Asian-American) coworker had had good luck, and that that person had recently gotten a $90K a year starter engineering job.

"Then maybe that's on them and they're not doing what they're supposed to," he was like.

(But, this is a flagship school with a national profile, and they're supposedly in an area with high demand, it being STEM and all!)

Overall, when I asked him what the take was on school and the economy among him and his peers, he said that school was *way* too expensive, but it still made sense to go since you could make more money that way, even if it wasn't all that like it used to be.

Signs of parental decline:

1) When doing a crossword, my father did not know which state was the "Tarheel State" nor its capital, and when he went to spell "Raleigh," he began spelling it "R - E - L - E - I - G - H," though he did ask if the 2nd letter was "E."

2) Immediately upon returning from a daytrip at like 10pm at night, my mother says how nice it is that my father left lights on for us before he went to bed, only, then she returns from a different part of the house and points out how he did not leave on the light in my childhood bedroom, but rather that in the bedroom of my brother.

3) For like a year-and-a-half now, his standard question on the phone is what the weather is like by me, presumably a coping mechanism since the weather is not indexed to recent or current or ongoing events all of which change and have to be discretely remembered, but rather is something that is always there, and can be asked after unproblematically.

My mother and her smartphone (2 of 2): Photos.

So, on her new smartphone, too, my mother says that after my uncle had died, when she was by his house downstate taking care of things, she was like three days in and driving around on those errands, and at some point she picked up her smartphone, and there on the phone was a picture of her brother.

"But were there pictures of him on the phone and had you been looking at them?", I was like.

Yes, she said, but she didn't have them up right then, but she slid open the phone, and there the picture was, just that one time, and it was just freaky.

My mother and her smartphone (1 of 2): Emojis.

So, my mother was visiting a historic cemetery where there had been buried all these small children and families killed in a historic local disaster, and when she was driving away, she realized that she didn't have her smartphone.

So, she went back to the cemetery and found it, and when she picked it up, there on the phone were two emojis -- one of a tombstone, and the other of a crying smiley face.

"And I don't use those, I don't even know if those are real symbols," she was like.

"So where did they appear?," I was like, "In a texting box? All big across the phone's screen?'

And, she really couldn't tell me, she said she'd have to show me on the phone.

But, she didn't.

A conversation with a high school friend (2 of 2): New house.

So, my one friend from high school who now teaches high school math was telling me about how he had boughten a house after his divorce and was glad to find something at a decent price, but then the realtor kind of laid it out for him and was like "Ummm" and had to fill him in that the last owner had committed suicide in the house, though she assured him that they still had a month and the money was in escrow and he could back out at any time if he wanted.

And, every night, he said, he was so upset, he had just all this anxiety, that he would move in for a better house for his kids, the one he could afford, and they would end up possessed or something.

So, he went to (Catholic) church a lot, and cried sometimes, and once when he was praying, he just mentally saw a statue of Saint Jude.

He also decided to reach out to this reikki practitioner who had channeled his ex-wife's mother after her tragic passing -- "If that helps you with it, fine," he was like, "If it works, it works" -- since he was thinking to himself, "Who would know about stuff like this," and it was then that he remembered the reikki lady.

So, the reikki lady came to do a walk-through, and when they were outside the house as she began it, she was like, "I'm getting the sense that you need to bury a statue here," and he had never told her about what he had seen at all.

Also, in that first part of the walk-through, the neighbor came over and was like, "Whacha doin'," and as soon as they left, the reikki lady was like, "They were involved in his suicide," but she couldn't tell him anything more.

During the walk-through inside, too, she said that it would end up fine as long as he did what she said, the spirit was ready to move on, and then when they were in the basement, there was like a lifesize metallic-looking shield and sword and helmet that the guy had made for Dungeons and Dragons, and the reikki lady was like, "And those, you burn those, don't keep them, don't give them away, you burn those."

So, he felt a lot better after everything happened, though when he went to burn the stuff it was during a forest fire alert and someone noticed and he was only a few minutes in when a fire truck pulled up and went to dowse his small backyard fire with this big hose that they pulled through the sideyard and around the house, and it was from them that he found out that the local fire chief is his neighbor, like four or five houses up.

He also said that the next time he saw his neighbors, the husband was like, "Nice guy, we never had any problems with him," and then he said that a week before the suicide, their dog accidentally got out and ended up chasing the former owner's cat and then he got mad and came over and talked to his wife just when she was getting in the car and she got scared and locked the doors and so he got even madder, and so then when he found out later he had to go over there and tell him never to talk to his wife again, so it was just that one time, but yeah, other than that, he was a nice guy.

. . .

A conversation with a high school friend (1 of 2): "Go buckets."

So, I was recently catching up with a high school friend who now teaches high school math, and he was telling me that recently his school where he teaches started a new school shooting initiative, where each room is outfitted with a "go bucket" right by the door.

I immediately thought it was like stuff to take with you in case a shooting starts happening and you suddenly have to hustle out the door, but immediately he went on to explain what it was, and no, it's actually the opposite, it's if a shooting happens and you're barricaded in the room for a long period of time, it's what you can haul out and use so someone can go to the bathroom in it if they need to.

. . .

A comment of my father...

...after he first spelled "rappel" as "r - e - p - e - l" for me when I asked him how you spell "rappel" for a crossword, and then when I told him it was the other "rappel" like going down a mountain and he properly spelled it "r - a - p - p - e - l", and then after we checked the dictionary to make sure he was right and I said that we didn't even need a dictionary, he was so good:

"Well, sometimes you need it around to double-check yourself."

. . .

Two recent perspectives on professions:

1) A retired (low-level) administrator from higher ed who I tangentially know was saying on social media that she used to recommend to people to consider moving into higher ed positions like hers for a career, but she doesn't, anymore, because they're just not as dependable or well-paid as they used to be.

2) A colleague from my doctoral program who got into non-profit work was saying that remote work was good when she needed it, and it's a hair better than the $50K in-person jobs that are basically what you can get around where she and her husband live, but there's no mobility, and she's actually seeing the previous upper-level jobs that you had hoped to move into liquidated, and their duties redistributed downward to the lower-level jobs, with no increase in remuneration.

. . .

(I had been texting the latter that I crunched numbers from my first full year at my one restaurant job at the one [Thai] restaurant where I work now, and I'm making $19.50 an hour average, which would be equivalent to a $45K desk job if you assume 45 hour weeks for 49 weeks a year...  And who knows, that actually might be more this year, considering that I got moved into better shifts.)

My mother's online research:

She uses the Air B&B site to see which nearby vacation homes have been converted into Air B&Bs.

"I'm not nosy," she's like, "But I like to know where there can be strangers around."

An impression of my childhood home...

...when I was on a trip to see my parents:

The temperature inside was so high.

. . .

Mildly passive-aggressive but also justifiable work correction...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

The (wife) owner with the (tired) face reminds me to keep my drink glass not in the corner outside behind the counter, but rather in the little wall-mounted wire basket in the short hallway going to the kitchen, and then a few days later when I don't do that, I turn around and my glass of (diet Coke) has disappeared, and I go and I look and I find it there.

. . .

Waiter meta-commentary.

Lately at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I have begun to make occasional, very gentle waiter meta-commentary.

Like, some parents are there with their young kid and they order a basic (Thai) fried rice with chicken spicy level zero, and I dutifully record that on my notepad and then am like, "Yes, chicken fried rice, spicy level zero, I've seen that one before," to their mild but appreciative amusement.

Around (Chinese) New Year's, too, we had a special pad thai where we used (Chinese) lo mein noodles instead of standard pad thai noodles, and when I'd go over our meal specials with people, at one point I started telling everyone when I indicated that dish, "It's kind of like the regular pad thai and people say it tastes the same, but it's a different kind of noodle.... When you live in a town this small, you have to make your own fun, and this is what we chose to do."

. . .

(People are really eating this [shit] up, it's like I disrupt the customary script and allow us to momentarily stand outside of our usual roles as server and client.)

On toast.

Sometimes the bread slices from the sourdough that I get at the local bakery in the (college) town that I now live in are just a little bit too wide for my toaster, so I have to put them in a bit diagonally, or on end.

But, towards the end of the toasting process, I can re-orient them, and they suddenly fit!

Just that much water goes out of the bread, that they sufficiently shrink.

Romance languages have become a blender in my head.

And (Italian) is pushing me over the edge.

Like, I started spelling the (Spanish) recordar with "ri-" at the beginning, and the other day I was talking with a (Guatemalan) coworker at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, and instead of saying conmigo for "with me," I said con me.

I think that once in such a conversation I also said la tuya something-or-another, when trying to use the basic (Spanish) possessive construction with a feminine noun, and I've also started saying (Italian) day-names sometimes, like lunedi for "Monday" instead of lunes.

Conversely, I sometimes f*ck up (Italian) with other (Romance) languages, like instead of saying ho visto for "I saw," I always want to say something like "ho veduto" like the (Romanian) am vazut.

I suspect that people think I'm on crack, to the extent that they come across this.

Some restaurant banter...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, with the (vegan) (academically-employed?) (straight) couple who resemble the Lovers from the Saturday Night Live skit, her with sweeping silver curls and him with round glasses and a (nerdy) (curly) (salt-and-pepper) (vaguely Jewish) beard:

Them: [mentions something about events at a recently-reopened bar that is now more upscale, including an ad that they saw for a 70s night]

Me: "Like the music or the age group?"

Her: "Well, it's kind of both, now."

. . .

Addendum addendum.

If you prepare a thought experiment where you travel back in time several decades and tell people to immediately plan for worst-case economic scenarios and shelve even cautious attempts at their dreams and to take nothing on faith about possible advancement or further opportunities and to flee as quickly as possible to any sort of guaranteed employment harbor that can't be hacked up and distributed over computers, and to lock down and save as much as possible and get plugged into retirement and housing as soon as possible, people would think that you were extremely cynical and that you were catastrophically paranoid and that maybe something was wrong with you, as well as that your thinking was clouded by severely unwarranted pessimistic thinking, almost kind of like you were a (Mormon) survival prepper, albeit without the cleancut chipperness or the conviction that things would come out all right on the other side.

But, it would have been solid advice.

It's like the only people my age I know who have done well immediately tracked into semi-specialized middling financial sector work or into state/local government jobs, or they went into medicine.

There's other outcomes, too, like law, but that usually involved heavy income loss and years of instability, where people finally pulled out of it finally, but not until after quite a number of years.

Addendum.

I almost feel like we're back in the days of where you need an in where someone puts in a word for you at the local factory, only, maybe you should aim for a job in the state or local government, where there's stability and benefits and maybe a pension.

Otherwise, with debt so high and employment so risky, especially with outsourcing and weak labor laws and stagnant wages with the bottom rising, why would you bet on investing a lot of time and money in your education?

If you did get a good scholarship somewhere or a reasonably-priced education at community colleges or regionals, you'd have to be very super, super savvy at picking sectors and trying to get internships, hopefully in a growing sector like eldercare or maybe green energy where you could ideally set yourself up for mobility and in-demand jobs.

On professional trajectories (3 of 3): On planning for tenure-track jobs.

Recently I saw two observations about planning for tenure-track jobs.

Like, one person was reflecting that timing is super important, like you finishing right at the right moment right when a job becomes open.

And, someone else was saying that they had received professorial advice that basically you have to wait for someone somewhere to die, otherwise there's no permanent employment.

Just a world of difference from back two decades ago when I embarked on that path, back when you had to make sure you were at a tippy-top program and did a bit extra (a peer-reviewed article, designing a sexy course or two).

Why in heavens would you ever want to put time and energy into this "profession" now, unless as a respite from sh*ttier jobs somewhere else and a hope you could maybe jag over into another career after having fun? 

And, that's more of a vacation, not a profession at all.

It's done, just an ignoble death where the remaining tenured folk continue their circle jerk till the heart of the last one stops and they've all dropped dead.

"Here, spend six or seven or eight years, and maybe hope that it'll be timed right on the other end, c'mon, try to join us!"

On professional trajectories (2 of 3): Other freelance writers.

Like a month or two ago, I caught up with a colleague from my doctoral program who has done some popular writing and has been successful at it.

She mentioned that one publication that had recently been started up a few years ago out of a university, is already shut down. A little staff turnover, and bam, it shut down (did that staff turnover trigger it, or did staff leave because the writing was on the wall? - who knows).

Also, the president of a civic organization that I'm a part of recently mentioned to me that a friend of his who's a journalist had an entire article written for a place, and then the publication was shut down before he got paid, and he had this entire thing written and he was stuck with it, after putting all of those hours in.

On professional trajectories (1 of 3): A journalism guy.

So, on social media I came across this one guy whose campus newspaper work as an undergrad I knew of and was amazing -- it actually resulted in major coverage in regional newspapers, and it was just really, really well-done.

Like, I had had a story that informed coverage in a few places, but his work was just a magnitude of difference better.

And, I'd seen later that he had an internship with a major national publication, and I *believe* he had major work published there.

Anyhow, he now does tech stuff in the Bay Area, that part of his life is done, moved on.

A dream involving work.

The other week, I dreamnt --

I'm at work and working but work is a giant multi-level building with interlinked rooms flowing into one another and sometimes down one step from another, including this quarter-story down area with exposed brick pillars and distant walls and a huge airy open ceiling and white table cloths, almost like a winter garden indoor patio, and me and my coworkers are doing our best to manage all of the tables across all of the rooms, which are too many for us, there's so few of us and it's such a big space, and I bring a Chang beer up to a table and the one (older middle-aged) (South Asian) (nattily-dressed and beblazered) customer who's there in a sprawling group seems confused, and then he turns to me on the table this large blue-gray bottle with a silver label that says in a big arcing brandname MAHARAJA and then has a word KING over to the lower left of it on the label, and I suddenly realize that his accent saying the word "king" when ordering made me mishear everything and so I brought him a Chang, and meanwhile my one older (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones had like right around then gotten his repeat order but brought him the right thing, and now there was a second beer, already opened, that we couldn't do anything with, and it was cutting into the restaurant's overhead...

And then, I woke up.

. . .

Short staffing at work, and an accordant joke.

Since we're a little short-staffed at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, it's really just the four of us holding down the fort as front-of-house staff -- me, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker, my one (tall) (new) (Thai) coworker, and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones.

So, one night my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was saying that we're like the four members of BlackPink, which is her favorite K-pop group, and which also has four people in it.

She said that she's Lisa, who's the one who's like (Thai), and that I could be Rosé, because of my hair color.

. . .

Texting (2 of 2): Some mixed (Spanish) and (English) texting.

So, since it was his birthday that week, though I didn't know exactly when, I made sure to text some birthday wishes to the one (Colombian) (STEM) student who I know from around town, that is, I wrote him --

Puta, feliz compleanos, y ricuerda, ahora eres una viejita, pero no cuestas menos dinero, cuestas MAS

('Whore, happy birthday, and rimember [sic], you are a little old lady now, but you don't cost less money, you cost MORE')

- and -

Pq el sexo oral es mejor cuando no tienes dientes

('Bc oral sex is better when you don't have teeth')

- to which he replied -

Haha i love your messages 

- to which I texted -

Good. Men are horrible. They will not only use you and leave you, but they will try to cheat you out of the money that you are worth

- and -

They are pigs 

- to which he wrote -

Did something happen 

- to which I wrote -

No

- and -

It's just a universal truth

- as well as -

And they probably try to pay you less because you are an old whore

- to which he wrote -

Haha 

- and -

I just like dick, so it is fine by me

. . .

Texting (1 of 2): Some (English) texting.

Back the other week a few weeks ago, I was texting with my one (professor) friend who studies (modern) (Czech) literature, and I was saying something about how unpleasant and rigid so many of the people are who study the one ancient language that I've been studying intensively for the past several years now, and as part of all that I said something about how they all "have sticks up their asses," to which she texted back --

Poor sticks

. . . 

Scientology memoirs.

Years ago I read pretty much all the Scientology-defector memoirs out there, but somehow I missed that a number of them have been published over the past 5-6 years.

So, lately I've been obsessively catching up on like the 6+ that have come out since the last time that I paid any attention, they're just so readable.

It's like this whole comforting repeated narrative arc: encounter with the religion, attraction, time with Hubbard on the boat, moving to land, rise of Miscavige, "The Hole."

But, there's always something different, too.

It's interesting, too, because it's actually at the point where multiple high-level people mentioned in different books have all left and written memoirs, now, so sometimes you see someone mentioned, and you're like, "Oh, they wrote a memoir, too, I read that!".

With the last one that I think I read before this, it was by a woman who had later come out as (lesbian), and then her one (non-Scientologist) composer/producer lover she started dating -- who, incidentally, wrote the McDonald's "I'm loving it" jingle -- also wrote a memoir, so you could go and read them both, which I did, though the last one wasn't related to (Scientology) and had more literary pretensions and it was like pulling teeth, to finish.

Anyhow, I was reading both of those back when I was working at the one resthome that I used to work at, and, like I so often did then, I was talking about what we were reading with my one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker, and when she asked me in turn what I was reading after I had asked her, I told her about these two memoirs.

"So they both are in a relationship, and they both wrote a book?", she was like, floored.

"Yes," I was like.

"That is crazy," she was like, still floored.

. . .

Coffee stain cleaner.

So, as with all coffee mugs, my one new-ish coffee mug shows coffee stains on the inside from the super-dark espresso that I drink vast quantities of each day, only it shows more on the inside than typical, since it's made of light ceramic.

And, it's interesting, using your thumb nail will scratch off a bit of the scummy stain, though if you use a scratch-safe dishwashing sponge, you have to scrub a lot harder than you think, since when you go to scrub it it actually mostly just seems to somehow form some kind of thick oil underneath it and move that thin tough sludge around on the inside, but never get it off.

Then, what happens to my surprise, but I'm craving milk, and I buy some organic milk the next time that I'm at the local hippie co-op, and later when I pour some dry oats and brown sugar into my coffee mug, I then put some 2% milk all on top of that, and then as I stir it then eat, I notice that the stain is gone, just completely gone from all inside of my coffee mug.

Something in the milk-fat must have gotten it off, without my having to really do anything!

I bet that has to do with chemistry, somehow.

Job application depression, witnessed.

So, there's a (Colombian) (STEM) student who I know from around town in the one (college) town that I now live in, and I think he does something in (biology), but he also does large-scale statistical analysis, and I think he has also also taught himself programming for that, to become indispensable to his lab.

But, he recently was saying that he's been down this term because he's put out easily 50-60 applications for internships and fellowships, and he's had nothing but rejection.

I wonder how many of those are posts in academia, and how many are industry-specific. If it's the latter, I am honestly shocked, because it seems like he's so well-prepared for any position with very skills-heavy STEM preparation.

I was telling him that I transitioned into eldercare 5+ years ago because I was hoping to avoid a lot of that, and then after decent eldercare work severely shrunk due to chronic sectoral mismanagement, I just went into restaurant work, since I didn't feel like being in that mental space of job applications, it's so much wasted time and effort for any sort of traction at all through jobs that are often okay at best, and often short-term.

I told him, too, that it's been hard on me not to have a profession, and I do talk to people in different lines of work and I do keep my eyes open on the look-out for opportunities, but I just don't want to go back to that indefinite awful process, and that in some ways when I look back on the past few years, I feel happier with my time choices to have d*cked around and done research and writing and whatnot, than to have spent it on that, especially now that some of my research choices have been paying off.

I mean, you never know when you're going to die, and can you imagine kicking it when you're in your third or fourth cycle of indefinite employment hell, and everyone looks at your coffin and is like, what was that all about, they never did anything or got anywhere, they didn't even really have a job, what were they doing all that time.

That's what I call a wasted life.

Research morbidity.

So, I busted my *ss and wrote up a research finding precis (8,000+ words!), and I confidentially gave it to 2 friends in pdf form, along with website login info and instructions on what they should do in case I get hit by a truck before I can publicly present anything.

It really would be a shame if my one major major major finding on the one ancient language that I've been studying intensively for the past few years somehow never made it to light, and now I've taken the necessary steps to guard against that possibility.

So, barring someone having the same idea (unlikely) or stealing it (slightly more likely, but still unlikely), I'm on track by the end of the year to always being "that guy" who figured out that one thing with a very famous language, within its language family, to the point where people looking back will always be able to tell the grammars written before me, and then the grammars written after me.

All in all, it's quite something.

"Now that's a third act," I keep telling myself.

Pre-work pep music (5 of 5): A song that has a great lyrical opening.

At other times very occasionally before work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I play this song.

I like the opening sound and lyrics, but then somehow I feel it doesn't hold up all the way through, though.

I also think that part about her looking just okay enough just wouldn't fly, nowadays.

Pre-work pep music (4 of 5): A song that has a great guitar opening.

Occasionally, I play this song while I get ready for work, at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now.

It has a great guitar part, to open.

Pre-work pep music (3 of 5): A song that only occasionally strikes me.

Every great once in a while, I go on a spurt and play this song while I'm getting ready to go to work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now.

But, it doesn't strike me that often.

Though, I have to say, that it's one of the great regrets in my life that I didn't see this movie right when it came out in theaters, before they re-released it to take out scenes that were deemed controversial.

Pre-work pep music (2 of 5): A song that's too short.

Occasionally before work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I go on a kick and play this other song, and I do love to sing along to the verses.

 

But, it's too short, and I often have to play it two or three or even four times in a row, to keep it going while I'm getting ready.

Pre-work pep music (1 of 5): My most popular song.

So, before work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I often cue up one of a handful of songs on a CD to blast, while I change into my work clothes of a black t-shirt and khakis and get my stuff together to go in.

This is probably the song that I play the most, it has such a good vibe, and I just imagine someone in a flowing dress dancing by themselves in a corner while they're on LSD somewhere in California in the late 60s.

MOOD.

I would really, really, really love to sing this at karaoke, by the way.

If you did it right, people would be just enwrapt, looking at you like, "What the heck is this."

Research strategy.

I think that I'm going to start a blog for my specialized research on that one ancient language that I've been studying intensively for the past 5 years or so.

I don't think that it will have any substantial volume, but strategically, it seems like the way to go.

Like I have done for years, I always try to build a new idea into the title of a talk, so you can publicize it and stake out and claim the idea in an indisputable way -- there's the title, it's dated, you were there by then.

That strategy has served me well, but I've had a major and mega-sexy idea turned down by one conference (they only chose people in tenure-stream jobs) and then that same idea was waitlisted for another conference (???), which shows to me that I'm spending too much time pursuing these people, as well as that criteria for talk acceptance can be radically unpredictable (are they on a different wavelength? do I make someone look bad and so a committee member puts up a stink and so they compromise and put me on a waitlist?).

Recently, too, I had a very small paper that I quickly wrote up with an idea that I didn't previously claim anywhere, since it was a decisive but very, very small contribution and I thought that it would just sail through the peer review process.

However, the first reviewer went after it so much, he said that there was no way it could even be revised to ever make it acceptable for publication, and that it was one of the worst articles that he'd ever reviewed!

(In other words, I'm very right, and he abused the structure and went after me hard to eject me from even having that venue for where I can publish something and advance the field, even in a small way, since it makes him and the field look like cr*p-ola, since what I did is so intellectually obvious in retrospect, once you say where you look for evidence)

Anyhow, between rejected and waitlisted talks and that one peer review, then, I really am starting to worry about the possibility of idea theft.

Like my one (art school) colleague who wear's (women's) clothes also thought after he read that one super-nasty peer review, did the guy try to close off any avenue for publication to waste time for me, so he could edge in and steal it? 

The response was so extreme, it does make it seem like something else could potentially be going on.

And, I mean, my ideas are big and decisive and simple and memorable and clear a lot of cr*p out of the field, so it's not like he couldn't understand it, and that type of work makes the ideas highly stealable.

So, in any case, I think the answer is to have a blog, where I can circulate the basic ideas on social media and maybe a listhost, and when an idea is ready, it's there, and I don't have to waste time on talks etc.

I mean, I'll still maybe try to give talks if I feel it, like at that one regional conference where people are cool, but I'd focus that on ongoing research, and not use it to debut new ideas per se.

If I'm able to put this stuff out there like I hope, that will be three major advancements -- and one major major major -- that have been done pretty much entirely outside of the field by someone who didn't train in it, only had glancing contacts with it, and was repeatedly rejected and so defaulted to using a **blog** to avoid all the bullsh*t that comes with contact with so many of the quote-unquote "experts" in this contorted and insecure "discipline" where they expect you to fall down and worship them without question, when in so many regards they don't even have their basic sh*t together.

Honestly, it's just like one embarrassment compounding another, for them.

If this stuff gets all out there like I hope, what will people of the future think, when they look back at the publication and presentation history of the major ideas?

Honestly, an independent blog, decisively correcting one major part of the entire research history of the language?

It's understandable when you dig down into the dynamics, but it's also just appalling.

Resthome chitchat.

During my recent trip back to the city that I used to live in, I stopped through the resthome where I used to work, to say hello to people.

I visited this one (highly-introverted) resident who I used to see sometimes, and she was happy to see me, since she's thinking of making a book out of her more than six decade's worth of diaries about her dreams, including everything that was going on during her life during that time, down to the TV shows that she'd watch regularly.

(My advice: don't default to chronological ordering, but explore other ordering principles. Also, include as an appendix her original diary entries for any dreams that she references, so future readers can compare both her immediate experience and her later holistic interpretations, where she's taking stock of her life.)

"You're looking so tan and great!", she was like, too, to which I demurred, saying that I had been just having coffee outside on a patio the previous day, during a leisurely sunny afternoon.

(I didn't tell her that I compulsively use leftover lime wedges from the restaurant where I work now, to give myself treatments for highlights.)

We also started talking about jigsaw puzzles, and she said that she'd do them sometimes, and my one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker would give her advice on how to do them more efficiently, like by grouping by color or by looking for odd edges.

(I guess she did that for many people, then, and not just me.)

. . .

A coworker revelation.

After she found out about how this (local) (mainly college student) club is hosting a K-pop dance night, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now said she is going to ask our one (younger) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker to come, since she's a BTS fan.

And, I was surprised at that, so the next time I saw her, I asked her about K-pop, and she was like, yes, she likes BTS a lot, but she doesn't really know other K-pop groups and so she isn't too sure about them.

Discovery anxiety.

So, I was talking with my one (Chinese-American) coworker at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, and I was saying that I was a bit nervous that someone will come across my one major major major ancient language discovery before I have a chance to sufficiently gather up all the loose ends and debut the idea, even though this is completely new in the research history of this one language and it hasn't happened yet ever in the entire history of research, so it's not likely to happen now, apart from me.

"But what kind of work did you have to put in to get this far?", he was like.

And so, I then listed off how I had to learn all the language phases and scripts, and how I've been gatheriing observations out of this one phase that no-one pays much attention to, and on top of that I had to read a gigantic encyclopedic linguistics book that people probably consult but don't plough through, and then I also have been reading comprehensive language grammars cover-to-cover for ideas, and just in general I've had to engage in multiple years of open-ended thinking that no-one really has the leisure for, keeping bits of ideas and observations in a notebook all the while.

And, this is rethinking of a major thing that people don't even recognize as a problem, it's so settled and unquestioned in basic grammars and recent scholarship, and it involves like assembling multiple, multiple  overlapping pieces, some with slight shifts, and others wholly new, in addition to my having recently studied the history of one branch of this well-recorded and well-researched entirely different language family, that's given me a point of comparison where I have different and higher expectations for what can be known, than other researchers in the area.

"Yeah, it sounds like your brain isn't accurately assessing the situation, you're probably fine," he was like, using therapy-speak.

Texting banter...

...after I sent my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the sister of the brother-sister) pair this story about how an unbroken egg was found from Roman Britain: 

Her: That's nuts!

Me: No it's an egg

. . .

Crime close by.

So, this was the "crime close by" calculus from my two recent trips back to the city that I used to live in:

On my one day-trip there for a museum exhibit that was about to close, there was a headline-making shooting four blocks from where I was walking downtown, a half hour before I arrived by train.

And, on my next trip there to see a stadium concert, within a week of when I visited, there were two robberies very close to where I had visited my one (half Sudanese) (half British) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair) and her family, and another robbery right near a major intersection of the hostel where I've been staying at and walk by all the time, and two more robberies up by a close-to-the-hostel business strip where I have gone to get food before and where I was by there on that trip two different times for coffee and dinner.

That's just an absolutely insane amount of crime activity close to places where I'd recently been, especially in such a short span of time, and especially considering how traditionally safe those areas have been.

It's like I saw someone saying on social media the other day, crime levels for that city used to be exaggerated and if you had your head on straight and kept your eyes open nothing would ever would happen, but now it feels like just by being there you're tempting fate.

Another joke, at work.

Everyone at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now was decently excited that I was going to see Madonna in concert.

And, the day after I got back, it was super busy at the restaurant, where we just ran and ran and ran all night with barely a moment to stop, and at one point pretty much every table in the house was full.

And so, when I was back behind the front counter over by the stack of appetizer plates and the little warming pot of miso soup, I turned to my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones, and, though I only had a moment to speak since we were both going off in different directions, I was like, "We're working harder than Madonna."

And, she didn't seem especially in love with that joke, but then like over a week later when it was a busy spurt again, she turned to me at a similar moment and was like, "We are working harder than Madonna."

. . .

A revised story of youth unemployment.

So, I had been telling my mother about my one (Chinese-American) coworker's story about how his peer group is unemployed several years out of college, and she asked me to ask him what major etc. everyone was, and where they went to school.

So, I did, and it turns out that he was exaggerating a bit, and it was really just one person he was thinking of, and they went to a top state school, but just did a straight-up American Studies major.

"And that's fine," he was like, "The world needs American Studies majors, but that's the kind of thing that you have to pair with something else."

I agreed, and I also asked about whether they were purposeful with internships, and he said they mostly did stuff with journalism, which is super competitive.

"And it's a declining sector," I was like. "Why would you want to focus on that?".

So, all in all, it seems like his story was mostly about one person who really wasn't working with advice they were probably getting from multiple sources.

He also said that one person he knows just graduated and got a great $80K job; they do engineering.

Woke language chaos, among other things.

So, a few weeks ago at work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, it was (Chinese New Year), and since there's a bunch of (Thai Chinese) in (Thailand), (Thai) people often know historic versions of (Chinese) customs, and my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones set me up with a (Chinese) saying that means "fat red envelope" (i.e., a traditional gift envelope that's super-full of money), and they had me go in back and tell the one (Thai Chinese) cook that.

They also were telling me about how it's a (Thai Chinese) thing to set up a big meal for your ancestors way early in the morning, and everyone does it and puts it on social media now, though they were talking to our one (Chinese-American) coworker and he was saying that he's never heard of that particular tradition, whether here or in (China).

(We all agreed that the [Chinese] [Communists] must have done away with that, just like they did away with this one [Chinese] [Buddhist] vegetarian festival that's historically [Chinese] but is no longer celebrated there, and is only celebrated in [Thailand], instead.)

"I heard you want a big red envelope," the one (male) restaurant owner said, too, towards the end of the night, when he came out from in back and surprised me and handed me a red envelope with a twenty in it, before going around to everyone else and giving them red envelopes, too, for the holiday.

Anyhow, because of all the stuff like that, we were all talking about holidays, and my (Guatemalan) coworkers were telling me how they don't celebrate (Halloween) in (Guatemala).

"Que bien" ('How good'), I was like, and then I intoned, "Demones" ('Demons'), and at that I nodded once decisively, while holding the eyes of my one (Pentecostal) (Guatemalan) coworker, who looked me back straight in the eye and seemed very seriously in agreement.

A bit later, too, I was observing to my one (younger) (female) (Guatemalan) worker in my (baby) (Spanish) that I've never understood why in (Spanish) you have senora for a married woman and senor for a man, while there's senorita for an unmarried woman but no senorito for an unmarried man ("Un hombre sin esposa").

"Because there's no word like that," my one (Pentecostal) (Guatemalan) coworker stepped in and more or less said immediately, in (Spanish), playing the man-slash-authority in the situation.

"I know," I was like. 

And then, I was like, "!Sexismo!", at which my one (younger) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker just nodded, knowingly. 

Then, I was like, "Necesitamos cambiar el idioma" ('We need to change the language').

And, at that too, she just nodded, knowingly.

Then, she started calling me and some of the other (Guatemalan) men senorito, which she has now done on several occasions, and although they don't say anything, it seems to make a few of them bristle.

"You can call me guapo," said the one (Guatemalan) guy who we started the diablo joke about, too, when she first said it to him.

A disconcerting concert interaction...

 ...as I stand outside the (local) (college town) concert hall and finish my take-out slice of pizza, chuck the to-go container in a trashcan right outside the door, and go to unwrap my fresh KN95 mask to put on, though I have a hard time unsealing the plastic wrap and it takes me like twenty-to-thirty seconds of fiddling, as I stand there facing the trashcan and messing with the packaging:

As I finally open it and chuck the wrapper away and don the mask and turn around to walk in, I see a police officer inside the busy lobby area looking right at me and decisively striding towards me, about to come through the doors at me.

. . .

(He must have been observing people for a potential mass shooter and found my behavior unusual, as I stood right there by the door but facing away from it, doing something that he could not quite see.)

A dream of reviving something broken.

The other week I dreamnt --

I'm at the side of an above-ground train boarding platform, and there by the bare concrete floor and cinderblock wall is a small open trashcan that I go up to and look into, and in there there are some things that I'd thrown out, including a (70s-style) (light tan) (synthetic fur) shirt-top that I'd decided to get rid of, since it was mildly stained and mussed and no longer quite wearable, if you want to look good.

And, I pull it out of the trash, since I decide on second thought that I can wash it, and donate it to a local resale shop.

And then, I wake up.

. . .

Running joke at work...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

When my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker comes and tells me that she's going to go to the bathroom so that I know she's gone and not to look for her in case I need anything, I do to her what she's done to me the past month or so, and I imitate her and am like, "No, no, noooo..." -- at which she is like, "Okay," and then she squats down and pretends to pull down her pants, and she laughs at me.

A recent workplace exchange...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, with my one (Pentecostal) (Guatemalan) coworker:

Me (gesturing to his shirt, which has something with [Thailand] on it, and then to his baseball cap, which has our state's name on it, due to the logo of the local state university): "Necesitas una cosa con Guatemala" ('You need something with Guatemala').

Him (looking me in the eyes, with a sudden and very gentle look on his face): [touches his heart]

. . .

Reprehensible wastefulness:

I am using a (metal) (butter) knife to cut apart the frozen cabbage soup chunk in a big cheap Glad tupperware container that I had frozen it in and then partially thawed out on a dinner plate in my refrigerator, and I promise myself that I won't accidentally slide the knife in too far and pierce the container side and ruin it like I did a while ago with a similar container, and then my hand slips and I go and do it, again.

A mail occurrence:

Recently, I go to go get my mail from my mailbox up by the front house, and there in the box is a single letter, and it contains a return receipt from a national charitable organization that I had made a donation to around the holidays, with the outside envelope saying something like RECEIPT ENCLOSED, and the one end of the envelope is hastily torn open in a big ragged flap, like someone has been looking for money.

Two sights in one day:

1) I go to do something in my kitchen, and I look out the window towards the front house, only to see some motion and a flash of like a giant half-eaten bread roll towards the top and back of a big needle-bearing bush, and there I also briefly see glimpses of a very large squirrel, eating and scrambling, as the branches sway and move and then go shaking back slowly into place.

2) At the local library, a group of librarians are gathered in a group behind the front desk and a (blonde) (middle-aged) one who has told me about her childhood trauma before has a guitar out, and she begins deftly strumming the guitar part to Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi," as a (middle middle-aged) (dreaded) (hair pulled-back) (black) (female) patron leaning on the counter and looking at something starts singing along, including the "Hey farmer farmer, put away your DDT now" verse.

Addendum.

Since I've had my big discovery on the one ancient language that I've been working on for a few years, now, I notice that I'm not quite there all the time; it's like my head is in a different place. Like, I'm not quite keyed in to other stuff I'm doing or my normal social interactions, and I'm kind of letting regular social interactions like texting friends drop away without noticing that it's happening, until I go to text someone and I see that it's been over a week since we'd last talked that way, when usually it would be only a few days, at most.

Somehow I feel like I'm going to be like this all year, through discovery debut and beyond.

I'm just like "in the zone."

A conversation with a local artist.

A few weeks ago I was socializing with this one (later middle-aged) (ostracized) local artist who I've gotten to know from around town in the (college) town that I now live in, and I was gushing about my big finding in the one ancient language that I've been studying for a few years, now.

And, I told her that I felt that it was super weird, but it made me think about death, and I was actually writing up everything in nuce in a file to give to a confidante or two or maybe even three, so that the findings can reach the world in case I accidentally get hit by a car or something before I have a chance to publicly present them, since it's such a major advancement for the entire history of that language's study, it would be a shame if somehow it didn't reach the light now, since who knows when someone else would come along who would have that same major realization again.

Like, there's other stuff I'm working on with that language, but other people could get that stuff with a little effort, so I try to get that out there quickly but I don't really worry about it in the same way at all, while this is just a whole different level of work, both in intricacy and importance.

"No, I get it," she was like, and she said that back when she was in the process of making the one big project that she's kind of known for, she often had the thought, "Please don't let me die now, I need to get this thing done, then I can go," and she said that it was refreshing to be around someone who was in that same headspace.

She also gave me one big piece of life advice: 

Never make enough money to where you can't qualify for Medicaid, since Medicaid is like the bomb.

Several occurrences on one recent day at work...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) When I tell my coworkers that I'm going to the bathroom so that they know that I'm temporarily not around, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker starts a new thing, where she shakes her head and gravely and very firmly says "No, no, noooo," like I don't have permission to go do that, and she does that several times over the course of the shift (I was drinking a lot of Diet Coke that day).

2) A (dumpy) (nerdy) (poorly-groomed) (young grad-student age) (white) guy comes in with a(n out-of-it) (eyeglassed) (well-groomed) (strange-eyed) (slightly older grad-student age) (Chinese from China) woman, and after they both say water with ice and I bring it to them, the woman touches the glass and immediately says that the water is too cold, and she sends it back and asks for water without ice, now, instead.

3) A (fatter) (older) (bleached out) (decently bald) (white) (fluffy-haired) man with (big blank eyes) and a (big) (fat) (belly) that he rests his arms on when sitting comes in with a(n older) (trim) (brown-skinned) (dark curly-haired) (very well-dressed) (vaguely-accented) woman who he keeps calling "my lady," and she is disappointed that we don't have the full range of (Japanese) food anymore "because of the pandemic" (like I always say), and she says she needs more time to order and right after that the guy jumps in and gives me his order and then she says right after that that she needs more time to order, and later when I come back to the table, she asks me about two entrees but says she doesn't like spicy and so I direct her to one of the two but she seems uncomfortable with that choice even when I say that she shouldn't try the other one if she doesn't like any spice at all, which she or maybe him had said, and when a bit later we serve the vegetable egg roll appetizer that she ordered she points to it and says "Is that veggie?", and later when my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker serves the food she asks for brown rice instead, which takes time to heat up, and when my coworker brings it out, she's eaten half her food, already, and she seems unhappy, and later the guy brings the bill all the way up to the front of the restaurant, and suddenly seems in a hurry.

(As soon as he leaves, "Two eighty-four," my one [older] [Thai] coworker who's a whiz at the phones says, pointing to the tip line on the like $45 bill, at which I'm like, "Yeah, they're very weird people.")

4) When I go into the kitchen at the end of shift, my one (young) (silver-toothed) (Guatemalan) coworker with the strong (indigenous) accent is sweeping up the floor as part of his end-of-night duties, and among all the random kitchen crap that he's sweeping up, right there in the middle of it is a single crab rangoon. "?Puedo comer?" ('Can I eat?') I'm like as I slightly stoop and point like I'm about to go pick it up, at which he pauses with his broom and looks at me, and then is like, "Si, senor" ('Yes, sir'), and then giggles.

. . .

Appreciative text about a gift...

...from my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair), after I brought her and her family some lemon poppy seed bread from a local bakery that makes good dessert breads:

Your cake was finished the day after you left. The kids keep asking for some and I'm like "you ate it all!" And then they go "oh yeh.."

. . .

(She always does follow-up letting you know how her kids like any gifts. She also told me verbally that they loved the locally-made sausages I brought them last time, and to bring more.)

A good year.

Recently, I had a major major major breakthrough with the one ancient language that I've been studying intensively for the past like 5 years, and it's put me in an extremely good mood, where I've been feeling like high for like a month.

So, basically, with this language, although I don't think it could have been avoided, they f*cked up something big that goes right to the heart of the grammar and right to the heart of major texts, and though it doesn't so much affect current translation values as perceive different structures and add a few nuances and open up translations into difficult passages, not to mention streamline the story of the language's development over time and make it vastly more intelligible, it seems pretty decisive, and once some details are worked out and it gets accepted by the field, no-one will ever be able to learn this well-known language without going through me and my major insight, ever again, and all the grammars that have ever been written will just look wonky and off, in at least one major portion of them.

The past few things I've done with this language have been pretty big picture too, but this is so much bigger picture, it doesn't even compare.

Like, with just around 40% of this idea, when I mentioned it to an old friend over the phone, she was like, "They didn't know that?".

Though there's good work going on with this language, and increasingly so, it really does make the whole field look like shit.

Like, on a listhost I'm on, they recently had an advertisement for an open enrollment language course put on out of some academic place, and I just kept reading it and was like, "I can't believe there's people out there teaching this language right now without knowing this," it's just that insane.

And, it makes everything so much simpler and less esoteric to learn, that I feel it's just going to set some people in the field off, where, to the extent that they are forced to notice or engage with it, they will be absolutely vicious and attempt to tear me down in any way possible, since it's just that big.

For the first time ever perhaps in my life, too, I have found myself thinking, "This is going to be a good year."

I'm not sure if I've ever really thought in those terms, before.

That said, I'm typing all this up and putting it in a Word file and entrusting it to like 3 people, so they can release it to another scholar for them to put online in case something should happen to me like I get hit by a car, because that would really, really suck, both for me, and for study of that language as a whole.

An excerpt from Balzac...

 ...that I came across recently in his novel Beatrix, where he describes a jilted society husband (translation by Rosamond and Simon Harcourt-Smith):

He followed the same principle in everything; Nature had bestowed upon him a handy talent for imitation; but he was no monkey; his imitation was deadly serious. Thus it was that, though lacking any natural taste of his own, he was adept at adopting new fashions, and being the first to drop them. The unkind accused him of giving too much time to his dress and of wearing stays; nevertheless he was the perfect type of those characters who by dint of embracing the notions and the imbecilities of the commonality, give offence to no one, and[,] who moving always with the times[,] never seem to grow old. Such are the fine flower of mediocrity.

Just delicious, and, as my one (professor) friend who studies (modern) (Czech) literature has observed, probably so much better in the original (French).

I also texted a photo of this passage to my one (grad school) colleague who went into social work, and he immediately texted back --

Why is this novel describing [a young tenured professor at where we went]?

. . .

Three recent interactions at work...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) My one (Pentecostal) (Guatemalan) coworker is wearing an AERO NYC t-shirt, and I point to it and ask, "Porque no se dice AERO [name of small Midwestern town that we live in]?", and he just purses his lips and gives a quick shake to his head and seems on the verge of slightly laughing but doesn't, and then he goes back to what he was doing and simply walks away.

2) My one (Asian-American) coworker says that a lot of his friends have graduated from college but have just been living at home for two years applying for jobs -- he's like 24 and is originally from New Jersey, and is slightly behind cohort-wise since he took some time off of school and dropped down to community college and went there part-time -- and he says that he thinks he can never really live in a city, but will have to live in a town like where we live now, since if he gets to the $50K salary that he hopes to get through his degree, his margin of saving would be too small to live in a city, and he could never save up enough to afford to buy a home there or even anywhere near one. 

He also said his friends can't really afford to live in a big city either, unless they get a good job in one before deciding to move there, and all otherwise just stick around wherever they went to college, or move home, which most do, since most are kind of marginally employed right now, and have been for several years after graduation.

3) When "Vogue" is playing over Spotify, I pull up the lyrics on my smartphone and show it to my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones, since she likes classic Hollywood.

"Monroe like Marilyn Monroe?", she asks me.

Then, as she reads along, she nods her head and is like, "Jimmy Dean."

Some (Germans) at work.

So, the other week at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, a (young) (vegetarian) (German) professor who I've met before was in again with her (ponytailed) (German) husband.

So, like I sometimes do with foreign-folk, I tried to speak some of their language with them.

"Achtung!", I was like, after setting down a plate of egg rolls. "Das Essen ist heiss."

("Careful, the food is hot.")

Later, she pulled out her smartphone and showed me pictures of a jigsaw puzzle that she got at a "cool" store in a neighboring state, with a trippy and vaguely futuristic mask, rendered in metallic ink, one thousand pieces.

She does jigsaw puzzles a lot for fun, she said.

A dream uniting past and present.

The other week I dreamnt --

I'm somewhere and I realize that since lime juice is used in bookbinding, I should gather unused limes at work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, and give them to this bookbinder that I know. But, since that's like feeding into another place's business, I think to myself that I should check with the restaurant owners, first.

. . .

(The bookbinder who I know from decades ago is now dead.)

A view of the tenured...

...at an online talk that I attended the other day, where someone who was tenured used their time to go in a slightly different direction from the topic of the panel:

In part because of academic scarcity, power structures like peer review are increasingly being abused to take down competition, and people rising through the ranks are much more hesitant to issue big ideas, for fear of eliciting a dogpile that will end their career.

. . .

More whack structures in Balzac.

Never seen this one before, in any of his like 10+ novels I've read:

As the marriage breaks up due to the husband's cheating, the book becomes a series of like page-long chapters, giving small moments of passion and confusion as the wronged wife tries to deny what's happening, and then adjust to it.

And, it's just like page-long chapters, forever.

Somehow I think Balzac got bored pounding out all of his novels, and spur-of-the-moment he was like, "Heck, let's just do this," and went with it.

Interestingly, too, he describes all these society wives as graceful and elegant and then the competitor as aging and having to adjust indoor light to hide her wrinkles, and then like twenty pages later he mentions that the wife with a young kid is like twenty-two and the competitor is like thirty.

Erp.

Balzac's whack structures.

I'm still reading that one Balzac novel, and like three-quarters of the way through, it turns into an epistolary novel for like twenty pages or so, though only with the letters that a new wife sends her mother!

And, it's the same book where the namesake character doesn't even appear till a third of the way in.

It's just structurally wacky, but I kind of like it.  Very random, and not all that big a deal and actually kind of interesting if you just roll with it.

I feel like you wouldn't get that sort of thing from someone who tortured themself over their prose style, instead of his focus on social detail and social situations.

I like the generic freedom.

COVID calculus.

In general I try to minimize COVID exposure -- I still mask in public places, for example -- but I do eat and have drinks inside, especially when transmission rates seem low and it's fall or spring and you can't use the patio yet.

 (Deep winter after the holidays is usually out; too much transmission, especially after people get back from Thanksgiving and then from Christmas and New Year's.)

A few weeks ago, though, I had a long day of research at the university library and I was thinking of stopping by a local townie bar that has a good grill to get a beer and something to eat, but an upcoming trip to the city that I used to live in for a concert stopped me:

Even though it usually wasn't packed and you'd sit relatively not near other people at the bar, it just didn't seem worth the risk to me, to get sick before my concert.

That's above and beyond my worries about catching COVID multiple times, since they say the more times that that happens, the more chance you have of something long-term and freaky developing.