A story from a (gay) (Colombian) grad student…

…who knows the one (gay) (Colombian) (STEM) student who I know from around town and who recently finished his degree:

Neither Madonna nor Lady Gaga had ever been to Colombia, and then they announced their first tours there within a very short time of each other, one going to Bogota and the other to Medellin, and so it created this crisis for all these (young) (Colombian) (gays) because most people only had money for one concert but not the other, so if they wanted to go see both they’d have to not only buy a second concert ticket but also travel, and so it was like this big huge crisis for a lot of people and he was in college and he didn't have money, either, and he actually had to go ask his parents to borrow money so he could go see both concerts.

Some recent-ish offness:

1) Already twice in like three months I’ve gotten mild sinus infections at my new job, where the air is dry and I’m always unmasked the entire shift.

2) One day going to work, I keep checking my pockets and it feels like something is missing but I’m not sure what, and then I’m outside the door and I realize that I don’t have my wallet, so I have to hustle back inside to get it, since it has my bus-pass in there and I couldn’t get on the bus to go to work without it and it has my money in it, too, which is what I’d need to get on the bus if I didn’t have my bus-pass, so, like, without it, either way I’d be f*cked.

Addendum addendum.

At a library trip this spring to the library at the local university, I had my KN95 mask on like I always do on public transportation and the supermarket and the university – I’m not exposing myself to unnecessary COVID infections in highly crowded places that are a mix of people, still, especially when undergrads are so unhygienic and gross– and I also had a backpack and 2 bags full of books because I had discovered that my auto-renewals had reached their limit and ceased for like a dozen books and if just a few more reached that my entire account would be shut down, and then on top of that I was checking out some new books and looking up even more stuff on an incredibly esoteric topic.

Like, masking and oodles of books and a disheveled appearance and weird shit that I’m studying, it was like I was a local eccentric and possibly a kook.

I’ve reached that level.

Addendum.

It’s interesting to see hits on my personal website. I get hits from like Germany and Japan, including after article submissions to journals. I can only assume that the editors are seeing who I am, or maybe the reviewers if the submissions got sent out quickly and the readers could immediately suss out my identity?

I also had a weird experience where my article that squarely fit into a new journal’s topic area was refused as off-topic and I got a mildly condescending refusal from a corresponding editor where he dropped in a hyperlink to accepted topics, to which I gently pushed back by pointing out how my article directly matched in multiple regards with what they explicitly said they accepted but his verbiage that was grounds for refusal wasn’t represented in public-facing documents so maybe their editorial board should discuss including some of that in there if these are indeed regnant criteria that they’ll be continuing to use in the future etc. etc. and I wish their new endeavor the best etc. etc. etc., to which he then replied back and “dropped the mask” and basically said that I did too much linguistics for people to understand (and that’s even though their journal flags linguistics as something that they do!).

Anyhow, like a week after that, a curator at a major international museum who sits on that journal’s editorial board looked up my LinkedIn. I can only assume that the corresponding editor circulated my email or concerns and this person wanted to know who I was?

The worst part of all of this is that these people’s current positions and training represents a global panorama of “the best” in this field, and they don’t know what to do with my contributions due to widespread gaps in training. 

It really is just shameful…  

Sometimes I really do wonder what these people do all day, if they’re not addressing major field problems or trying to find ways to do so.

Getting scooped.

Lately I’ve been living in dread of getting scooped on some of my research ideas about the one ancient language that I’ve been studying for quite some time now and have been making myself into quite the expert in.

Over the past couple of years, there’s been a few articles whose titles have made my heart stop when I came across them, although once I actually read them they turned out to be largely misguided takes on real issues that I’d already solved in more-thorough ways.

Lately, though, it’s been clear that this one guy who does good work has put his finger on some major long-term resystematizations that I also arrived at through another avenue. Like, I got one of his articles via interlibrary loan and it’s different/compatible with what I’ve been doing and had started to stake out, but he also has an upcoming “research results” conference and it really makes me wonder if he’s doing anything new.

I have definitely made sure to claim my different ideas through embedding them in conference talk titles and slides and whatnot, so I can always point to that – like, worse-case scenario we did the same thing separately and we acknowledge each other’s work – but, it would be better if I had the articles already published.

Only, they are so intensively time-consuming to write, that they’re just draining and they just take forever to write up…

Sigh.

All these past 10-15 years, I wouldn’t have had someone breathing down my neck, but now I do, when I’m finally hitting my stride.

Some food at my new job.

At the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of the historic hotel where I now work at, it’s been interesting to try out all the different food on the menu.

One day after a reception, they had some chicken tenders and cheese curds left over, so they put them out in this staff area back behind the kitchen, and I found myself making detours to get them, although the cool chicken tenders were a heck of a lot better than the cold cheese curds, which were kind of gummy with breading on the bottom that was starting to get all soggy and greasy when the oil in everything cooled and settled downward, I’m assuming.

They have this one dessert drink that’s also very awesome.  It’s not my typical kind of cocktail – I’m not big on the sweet ones – but it’s creamy and coconut-y and citrus-y and it’s just good, and I can see now why my one (straggly-bearded) (thin) (white) (stoner) cook coworker gets them all the time after work for himself… In fact, it was so good that I was telling my mom about it on the phone, and she says that she thinks she’d like it, and it’s not her type of drink, either, she usually goes for amber beers!

Their salads are also really good, although they tend to be heavy on rich ingredients like cheese and fatty dressings (nothing there is too healthy, someone told me when I first started there).

The burgers also tend to be the “thick meat patty and lots of toppings” kind of burger, which isn’t my favorite, to be honest, as I tend to go for the thin patty ones with simple lettuce, onion, pickles and mustard – a “smashburger,” as people annoyingly call them, now – but still, I’ve managed to find at least one burger that I genuinely like on the menu from the 2 that I’ve tried, so I can speak about the burgers authentically with any customers who ask about what’s good or what’s my favorite or whatnot, or so I can merely comment on how good their one particular burger looks when I serve it or so I can say “good choice!” or whatever when they order the one that I like, to like bond with them over the food and stuff.

Two recent misfires:

1) As a study routine for that one notoriously difficult language that I’ve been studying intensively lately, I was doing DuoLingo at home and then flashcards on the bus on the way to work, but all too often I just wouldn’t get through all the flashcards in time, and I’d want to look at them on-shift or have a lot of work to do after work when I was tired.

2) I get a special letter from my bank with a check that was returned as already cashed, and I realize that I had decided to try remote deposit at my national bank using this app that I’d recently downloaded, and then I’d kept the check that I'd deposited that way out by my records to check against my statement when it came in, only I’d forgotten that I’d cashed it that way and so I discovered it later and I went to deposit it at my local bank along with my paycheck from that week.

(Oops.)

(I’m just glad that there wasn’t a fee.)