Moving...

4 things:

1) Met my one lawyer friend from Missouri at a coffee shop a short bikeride away from my new place. I'd been there before, but what really struck me is how this whole part of the city is full of nothing but white people trying to seem cool to each other.

2) After, though, we stopped by "Balkan Restaurant" and got some smoked meat crepes with onion and sour cream and feta cheese. Mostly Balkans in there... There's diversity on the street here, but not really any interaction between people in businesses etc. it seems.

3) Coming back from the grocery store on Sunday, some Mexicans were unloading pallets of strawberries out of the back of a truck, and were selling them for $1 per carton (and each carton was a pound!). I wonder if they swiped them, or got a deal on pallets of super-ripe strawberries since stores wouldn't buy them, or they were contaminated with salmonella or something. There's a lot of illegal street-vending like this in my neighborhood right near the subway stop.

4) Some friends from my old neighborhood were at an Appalachian country-western bar like 4 blocks away from my house on Sat., and I met up with them later in the night for a drink after I got out of a house-warming party for a friend of a friend. The house band there is great, and the (white) woman singer/amped acoustic guitar player who's in her 50s and wears short skirts and has big hair ("Reva") is a great singer...

During the break from the band's 2nd set, I leaned over to my one friend and was like, "Don't look, but Reva's over there by the bar eating a banana."

Which she was, and he looked. Everyone I went with is in love with Reva. I'm interested to go for the bar's karaoke some night.

iPad.

My one lawyer friend from Missouri says it's a really bad choice for a product name, since it makes her think of those pad-things that women use.

I never had thought of it, so my guess is that men will have no problem using that product.

Know what freaks me out?

When I make a photocopy, and left on the copy is my wrist and arm cuff from holding the book. It kind of bothers me to look at that and then at my own wrist, and I don't know why.

Quick trip home (5 of 5): Gooey shit.

Forgot -

On that same train ride back from my quick trip home, I was just nodding off when I felt like I needed to shit, so I went downstairs to go take one, and after I got off the toilet, there was this huge, squat, roughly conical pile of the probably one of the gooiest shits I've ever taken.

I didn't realize it at first, though, until I flushed the toilet, and the blue chemicals that went through left like an eighth of an inch of shit left on the toilet, and a second flush didn't budge it.

Since I had used a paper towel with soap on it to wipe out my ass - who wouldn't, just to be safe, after a shit like that!?!? - I then got a new one, and wiped some of the shit off the rim by wrapping the paper towel around my fingers and then wiping off the bowl as best I could. I did that twice, then tired of it, so I left a lot of shit still coated on the toilet when I went out.

Quick trip home (4 of 4): Train trip.

On the way back from my recent quick trip home, I took the Amtrak train back, and got locked in the restroom...

When I went downstairs to use the restroom in the car (it was a 2-level car), I used the bathroom right next to the door that opens up when you de-train, and as it turns out, someone had slept through the previous stop and missed it, and so they stopped our train next to train going the other direction, and as they were getting out the gangplank so the guy could walk between trains, I couldn't open out the bathroom door, and so was locked in for like 5 minutes.

Quick trip home (3 of 3): Politics.

On my recent quick trip home, my mom told me that she got a phone suvey with three questions:

1) What is your political party?

(Her answer: Independent.)

2) Were you happy about the House's recent passage of the health care bill?

(Her answer: Yes.)

3) If an election were held today, would you vote to re-elect Bart Stupak.

(Her answer: Yes.)

No idea who was sponsoring that survey.

Quick trip home (2 of 3): Thinking alike.

On my recent quick trip home, I saw a friend from high school who's doing a ph.d. in social psychology, and it turns out that she also has mentioned our one friend's 2nd-wave feminist, cigarette-smoking, muu-muu-wearing mother, also to share a feminist insight, but in this case on a class on gender and feminism.