Like last week I dreamnt -
I'm in my bathroom looking in the mirror when I get up in the morning, and the front of my hair is like bleached blonde and tufted up and it looks all coarse, all from the lemon juice that I put on it "on the reg."
And, I think to myself that that lemon juice that I had put on it the previous day must really have been in the direct sun a lot, to get my hair looking that blonde.
And then, I wake up.
. . .
(. . .)
When I recently went to the website of an every-four-years academic congress to check out the presidential address for possible inclusion in a paper that I'm writing, I stumbled on a draft of the relevant bibliography summarizing work in that field over the past four years.
And, my work wasn't included, although I reached out to someone and found out who wrote it and I emailed that other person my relevant articles as well as a book review, since I had noticed that someone else had listed a book review, too, so why shouldn't I list the one that I did.
And, the amount of stuff I've done puts me right neck-and-neck at the top of the scholars working in that field just in terms of numbers of publications, not even in terms of the magnitude of the findings, like two-and-a-half of which are relatively big and which don't seem to be matched by anything else that anyone else seems to be doing.
Funnily enough, one of the few other top people is someone who works as an independent scholar, too.
Just because you're dedicated and do good work doesn't mean that someone will throw you a bone, in an atmosphere of scarcity.
...from my one (Mormon) colleague who teaches at an R1 state school:
1) He says that he's pretty much given up on the integrity of online courses over the past 2 years because there's no way that you can do assessment without in-person anymore, and he's definitely kicked this concern up the chain-of-command in a very vocal manner multiple times, but admin keeps putting the courses on simply because they want the money.
He also starts each online course telling students that he hopes that they use this opportunity to learn, because they can learn that way, if they choose.
Otherwise, he just phones it in, and turns his attention to in-person classes, where at least you can control things.
2) He also says that it's not like when we were in high school back in the 1990s, nowadays kids can't even get summer jobs anymore, at least in a lot of areas, so it's like they apply and apply and apply and never even get call-backs, not even from fastfood places.
So, like his kids have spent theirs summers volunteering at a wildlife place, but that's only becausa they couldn't find any jobs.
He also says that the typical "summer jobs" that kids used to have like supermarket checkout clerks are now filled by older people who can't afford to retire, at least in his major metropolitan area that he lives in in the Southwestern United States.
. . .
(Imagine kids now, going through that application mess in high school, and then resume-hell again for college internships and afterwards, just endlessly, and all for reduced opportunities.)
Does shit get moldy?
Like, if you took a big wet runny dump and just let it there in the same place like where food left out would get moldy, would mold develop on the shit?
If shit does or can get moldy, why don't we see like moldy dog turds out in filthy dog-parks, or like a layer of mold at the bottom of an outhouse or an over-filled Port-a-potty where you can see all the shit through the hole where you shit?
Like, imagine a filthy Greyhound bus where there's shit caked on that little metal flap thing that's like a trapdoor down into the deodorizing-liquid holding-tank in the bus's underbelly.
Like, why isn't there a layer of vitiated grey-blue mold on that caked-on shit there?
Someone should ask an expert in fungi.
And, some fungi expert should do a whole lecture on this, in their Introduction to Mycology class. It would be legendary. Just think of the slides!
Studying that one notoriously hard language for dual citizenship purposes is such an incredible time-sink for me, right now.
I do DuoLingo for like fifteen to twenty-five minutes a day to practice paradigms, but the big thing is just memorizing a shit-ton of vocabulary, since it’s not related to anything you would ever know and there’s not really all that much borrowed vocabulary from common languages with international impact.
And, that’s like forty-five or fifty minutes of time a day, though it’s growing increasingly less as the vocabulary settles in, per the algorithms on the flashcard app that a programmer friend who’s into languages helped me set up on my laptop and on my smartphone.
I can see progress – like, I read a sample sentence from a newspaper article that I tried to get through months ago, and now I know a lot of the vocab there – but, still, it’s just so time-consuming.
By the time I have breakfast and get ready and then turn to language study, it turns out being like a two-hour chunk of my time every day, since I have to have breaks in between different sections of study, like between DuoLingo and flashcards and then between memorizing new vocab and practicing old vocab.
I’ve heard that it’s more effective to study languages in small doses, like it’s better to study twice for fifteen minutes than once for forty minutes, but, it’s hard to schedule my day and get that regular study in without doing it all upfront.
Like, the few times that I got interrupted and I had to do some at night after work, my recall rates were truly horrible.
Just such a time-suck, though, when I have so many other projects that I could be focusing on.
Sigh.
But, there should be only a few more months of memorizing base vocab, fortunately.
After a short trip in July, I got back early and ran to the grocery store before work, to get some watermelon and also to restock on avocados for my morning avocado toast that I have every morning.
And, an eighty-nine cents a pound sale led me to get two cabbages, too, for making meals or for sauerkraut.
Only, the next morning at the farmer's market, larger and nicer cabbages were in season everywhere, so I immediately wondered why I hadn't thought of that before I got the ones at the supermarket.
And, I also realized that it was a mere ten days before I left for a two-week vacation to go visit my parents, and so it's not like I'd be able to cook up the cabbages into anything before then anyhow, and so they'd just take up room in my refrigerator for like almost a month.
At the farmer's market, too, I circled back around and got carrots with nice big long carrot-greens from the one (classic rock vibe) (Harley Davidson-ish) (older) (white) guy who does organic gardening, and I told him that his carrots were tempting me too much and so I had to come back for them and buy something from him a second time that day, and I added that my one major addiction was to buy too much at the farmer's market every week.
"In terms of addictions, it's not a bad one to have," I was like.
"And we like it!", he was like.
On a day when there’s tornado sirens in the morning and then again in the evening as a second line of storms push through, I come back up from the basement of the front house and turn on my overhead lamp inside my cottage, and automatically it’s a bit dim, and you can see water at the bottom of the fixture.
And, I had the light on earlier that day, but nothing like that happened, only after the second, stronger storm system with the high winds.
And, the landlord passes all that on to the (older) (white) (townie) roofer, who comes by a day or two later and who I see walking around in the yard, and so I come out and he says that wind from certain directions can push rain up into cap shingles that run down the roofline, and that’s probably what happened there because the roofline is right over where the lamp is on the inside and look, you can see the gap from here, it’s those places where you can almost stick a pencil up in it, and he doesn’t like to seal that with silicone, but that’s what you’re going to have to do, with this one, and then everything should probably be all right.
And, he adds, LED lights “don’t give hardly no heat,” and if you get water in a bulb like that, older bulbs would dry that up, but not these ones.
