New workout results.

I truly am in love with resistance bands.

The workouts are short and sweet, they’re not hard on your joints, and you can really see results super fast, and that’s besides how cheap they are to buy and how they really don’t take up any space in your apartment.

When I’m at work now and holding out plates in each arm as I'm bussing, I can feel the muscles in my forearms through my shoulder and especially into my back, and I’m just like, GRRRR.

I also notice in my forearms, how they’re a bit wider and they tense up now and look bigger, when I grab things.

I was discussing this with my one (affable) coworker who was in the (military), and I even flexed a bicep for him.

“I see shadows, man,” he was like.

I think he was referring to how muscles get so big in their curvature that they actually start casting shadows?

A very disconcerting experience at my new job…

…at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel:

I start like at 4pm and so a little bit before that I stroll in the front doors and it’s bright and sunny and quiet with large beams of light streaming through all the windows and no staff are around and there’s just a lone man at the dining room corner table, eating, and since I need hot water for my tea I just walk up to the espresso machine and take it from there like I usually do, and the entire time that I’m in there for minutes and minutes, there’s just no-one around, so it’s like I’m someone who just walked off the street and decided to use the espresso machine, and I only finally see staff when I wend my way through the restaurant and go through “the server alley” on my way to go dump my stuff in the breakroom/changing room that we have downstairs with lockers where we can go throw our stuff before work.

And, before I finally see someone, it’s totally like the beginning of a zombie movie, where life is breaking down and everything is empty and nothing is normal but lone scattered people are in denial and are still trying to force themselves into normality as a coping mechanism, while other people are going into spaces and claiming things because the social boundaries that used to be in place that they’d be violating are no longer there.

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.