Supposedly anonymous peer reviews.

In the past half year, I got back some supposedly anonymous peer reviews for an article where a peer reviewer in the first round had tried to sabotage the project (probably because I'm obviously right, and they'd tried to put their hand to the notorious field-problem before, to no avail).

And, these new peer reviews you could work with, but they were still shocking. You could totally tell who wrote them, and although I’d previously categorized these people as better people in the field, there was still some pretty glaring eccentricities in thinking, as well as the use of widespread but poorly-grounded operative categories that they simply weren’t questioning, but instead rotely repeating as obvious touchpoints.

And, these are the good ones.

Like, what the f*ck is up with this field that I’ve been dabbling in, with the one ancient language that I’ve made myself into quite the expert in over the past number of years?

Honestly.

The quality of scholarship is just very bad, although I often charitably call it “uneven.”

I really don’t understand what these people do all day, since they certainly don’t seem to be solving major unresolved issues in scholarship.

Professional oddity.

After my one popular lecture a few years ago, people have been asking me to do another one, but the biggest stumbling block has been access to a portable projector for a PowerPoint.

I can understand why university tech resources wouldn’t want to loan them out to just anyone, but it’s just an odd position to be in, where I can access the libraries and maintain a larger practice with conference presentations and journal publications and whatnot, and yet I don’t have access to that basic tech.

It’s really like a dividing line putting me on the outside of the profession, separating the haves from the have-nots.

One of those days, a few months ago.

I wake up and am waiting for my coffee to brew, and then I realize that I forgot to turn it on.

And then, when I do turn it on, it’s the wrong burner and it starts singeing a pan that I had sitting out on top of it, which I only notice when the burning gets so bad that you can start smelling it.

It’s a rainier, greyer day, too, and I can’t read the footnote of an article that I had printed out in 4-on-1 format to save paper and make it so I save space in my hard files of marked-up articles, so I have to bring it to the window to look at it there, or use the bright light on my smartphone to illuminate it.

At the local brewery that night, the one (white) (young) (female) bartender with (pussy hat) energy is coughing up a storm and wiping her nose with the back of her hand, repeatedly, and it’s totally Typhoid Mary vibes.

. . .

(“Maybe she needed the money and couldn’t afford not to come into work,” my mom says later.)

A customer interaction at my new job…

…at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel, that I now work at:

When a (well-dressed) (vaguely foreign) (round-faced) (older) (white) lady who's (mildly chunky) and who had been getting wine and cocktails with two (educated) (white American) types goes to pay, she hands me the bill and cash, and is like, “That should take care of it,” to which I’m like, “The only problem is if there’s too little.”

And, at that, “Ha!”, she’s like, “Yes!”.

A strange nighttime event.

I’m shutting off lights in the kitchen and preparing to go enter my bedroom to read before bed, when suddenly my mild headache becomes a quick sharp pain in my right front lobe, just there and gone in a flash.

And, it really freaks me out, although there’s no effects on anything else like impaired motion or whatnot like I assume would happen from a burst blood vessel or a mild stroke or that kind of thing, so I just chalk it up as a manifestation of the mild headache that I was having, although I do consider writing a farewell note or something saying what happened to leave on my kitchen table, in case I don’t wake up, which in retrospect is odd since if I was feeling like that was a true possibility, I probably should have gone to the emergency room to figure out what happened and gotten it checked out.

A feat of envrionmental neuroticism:

After late spring ants start coming into my cupboard and crawling all over the (folded over and binder-clipped down) bag of brown sugar there, I pull out this damaged Glad plasticware bowl where I had accidentally put a knife through the side in a big slash since I had used it to freeze some broth and then was cutting portions off from the frozen ice-chunk inside that plastic bowl there and the knife slipped, only, now I just slapped duct tape over that part of the bowl, and I could use it to seal the sugar inside and keep it ant-proof, since the ants couldn't smell it anymore once it was inside the repaired container.

An advantage of my new job:

I can walk or bus to this one grocery store near campus, and then walk and catch another bus route home, and that store usually has *great* sales on Greek yogurt, not to mention avocados.

For me, Greek yogurt is like the perfect treat, especially when it’s non-fat, since it’s all savory and protein-rich and relatively low calorie – 1 gram of protein per every 10 calories is a good ratio, I’ve heard – and plus you can dress it up with like oats and brown sugar and stuff if you want to, as some sort of dessert/sweet thing that’s not too horrendously bad for you.

The only downside is all if the plastic containers that are left over afterwards, even if you buy it in bulk and not in the little individually-packaged thingies… Just so wasteful.

I wish they had some sort of more environmentally-friendly bulk yogurt containers that wasn’t plastic, to tell you the truth…  Right now I’m just washing them out and saving them in my cupboard so I can use them to store bulk beans and grains and whatnot when I buy that kind of thing down at the local co-op, although there’s only so much of that that you can do, to re-use containers.