Post-quitting feelings.

After quitting my job, I was catching up with my uncle on the phone, that's my dad’s younger brother, and, like many times as an adult, I’ve been amazed at his insights into people.

Like, when I told him very briefly the situation, right away he said that the problem was my one (Thai) boss’s “inadequacy.”

He had been in the corporate world a long time before his retirement, so I can only suspect that a lot of those insights come from his experiences there.

Overall, though, the aftermath of my quitting felt very good, like I made the right decision, although I was walking across the street on a Monday and I glanced out of the corner-of-my-eyes into the window, there, and there was my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker, working in the restaurant on what should have been her day off.

On astrology.

The New York Times recently had an article about a museum exhibit about the history of astrology that had this interesting comparison:

Alexander Boxer, the author of “A Scheme of Heaven,” about the history and science of astrology, argues that horoscopes during antiquity have more in common with modern algorithms than with the esoteric predictions of many contemporary horoscope writers.

“It was a very technological and math-heavy field,” Boxer said in an interview. He compared people’s views of ancient astrology to our modern relationship with artificial intelligence, which he said… also “offers advice via opaque data-driven algorithms that you, the end user, are expected to trust but not to understand.”

Just a very, very incisive comparison.

Additionally, when I sent that article to my one (Mormon) colleague who I do a summer book-club with, he texted back:

Thanks for the article. Quote: “According to Allied Market Research, a consulting firm, spending on astrology-related products and services is projected to increase from $12.8 billion in 2021 to $22.8 billion in 2031.”

How do we get in on that?

. . .

(. . .) 

A (Brazilian) insight on (English).

Several times I heard the one (worked-out) (STEM) (Brazilian) remark to (Brazilian) friends that people say the word "cute" in (English) about grown people who they find attractive.

"Cute?", he was like, "Cute is a baby! I am hot." 

An Easter conversation with my mother.

She says that she went to the Tomb of the Holy Sepulcher, back on an around-the-world trip that she did with two other girls, back when she worked as a stewardess.

And, they had to wait for some people to come out so that they could go in, but it wasn't like the crowds that you see on TV, now. 

"I'm glad, I really wanted to tell you," she was like.

She also said that it's nothing that my father didn't remember that it was Easter Sunday, since they weren't doing anything special to celebrate and plus she only mentioned it to him once that day, in the morning.

It was also nothing that he forgot that my restaurant is always closed on Sundays, and that the previous day he had asked me if I was going to the big sports tournament game, which was held in another city and which would have been a major trip for me and which I had never said anything about at all, about going to it, instead I had just been saying that I had bought a sports-team t-shirt to wear at work for the game since we were encouraged to do that and it seemed like fun.

He just gets tired at the end of the day a lot, my mom says. 

Scholarly annoyance.

The big scanner just off the circulation desk room at the local university library is great for taking quick scans of huge oversize books... 

It has like this big moving arm up on top, that somehow swings out into the air over the book that you lay out below for it to capture, so you don't have to flip the book upside down onto a glass plate or anything like that.

But, if you have a book with glossy pages, all too often there's this line of brightness across the image that eradicates any of the text that was underneath, and it's hard to adjust the book so that doesn't happen, or so that it at least happens at a manageable level.

So, beware!

For this, books published by Brill particularly suck. 

Advice for sugarcoating your resume...

...if a potential employer presses you on why you left your last job, per the one (older) (white) (female) (townie) bartender at the local brewery:

Just say "it became a toxic environment," and leave it at that.

. . .

(She says that those words do wonders nowadays, and it says everything and people won't go into it, though of course I should first say like I was planning to do anyways something innocuous like "I'd been there a while and it was time for a change," this is just if they press you on it like they don't believe your reason, this is a good thing to say then.) 

News of a death:

Around the turn-of-the-year, since I haven't visited the one resthome that I used to work at for a while and since the one resthome resident who used to give me candy didn't look too good on my last visit -- walker, oxygen, sitting a bit out-of-it in a chair when I arrived -- I look online for an obituary and I don't find one, so I jot her a note about how I hope that she's doing well, I had taken longer vacations to see my parents and for a conference and I hadn't had a chance to come by recently, etc. etc. etc., all very light and cheery, since who knows where she is, healthwise, and in big letters, too, so she can read it, and I throw it in the local mailbox like a block away from my house.

And, like a week after that, I pick up my mail and there's a medium-sized envelope that was delivered and sitting amidst my daily newspaper, and I pitch it on my kitchen table and I don't look at it closely until I get home that night from something, and then I look at the return address label and it's my old (white) (gay) (Midwestern) (retirement-age) coworker at the resthome, so I get a feeling that she died, especially since the envelope is large-ish, and I open it up, and right there is my returned letter and a card from him saying that she passed away a few months ago with her nephew and niece there, and he tucked in his Christmas newsletter about him and his partner.

And, I remember that I had phone trouble the very day that I last visited her, so I look it up on my phone, and the last date that I visited was exactly a year to the day that I got the letter from him, returning my letter and saying that she had died.