Stories of my new neighborhood (3 of 4): Down the hallway.

Like a week ago, I was putting on my shoes to go catch the subway and go into school - it was late morning, like 10:30 or 11am; I didn't have to on campus till late that afternoon and so worked from home for most of the morning - and I heard a heavy knock on a door down the hall, and someone being like, "Police!", and something about eviction, but when I came out into the hall like a minute later, no one was there.

The next day, 2 doors down from me and across the hall, there was a neon-green sign pasted on a door saying 'EVICTION - NO TRESPASSING' by order of the county sheriff's department.

Stories of my new neighborhood (2 of 4): Phyllis update.

Saturday night after getting my one (white) friend from Mississippi to take me out to IKEA - I paid gas and dinner for him; we went to this restaurant called "Iraqi Kebab" that we saw on the drive out there, my beef couscous main dish was okay, but the eggplant soup was dynamite - we caught a country-western band at an Appalachian bar near me, and after we left and he went to head home, I went to that one bar with the plywood sign out front, and as it turns out, Phyllis was working.

She said they asked her to move from her new apartment, because there's been some vandalism since she moved in - someone broke the glass in a fire extinguisher case, and someone overturned a potted plant in the hallway on the next floor down - and they think it was her, since nothing like that had happened before she moved in. She says it's shit, but if they're going to treat her like that, she wants to move anyways, and at least they're giving her her deposit back.

I suggested some other places in the neighborhood where I had seen signs out advertising rooms for rent, and she said she'd look into them, but she needs a small place where they don't do credit checks because she's never had a credit card or gotten into trouble that way, but her sister once put her utility bills in her name and so of course she refused to pay them, and so she ruined her credit.

Stories of my new neighborhood (1 of 4): Meat.

I was at that one store in my new neighborhood, which is run by Mexicans and has a ton of international food products, and was looking for a cheap piece of bacon or pork fat to use in a black beans recipe I have (I've been experimenting with beans-and-rice recipes lately, and finally have the right combo of veggies, and now I want to try adding meet).

I asked the Mexican at the meat counter if they had any, and he said no, they didn't carry any pork, and though I know that they were halal (sp?), I didn't know that that meant no pork at all for other customers, since, after all, they had pre-packaged pork in the deli fridge.

Then, when I was at the deli fridge, I heard the one Mexican laugh and say something about "el Americano" to his friend who had come out of the back, and that guy laughed, so I looked up and caught his eye, and he looked sheepish. I bet he was talking about how the American dude asked for pork at the deli, or something like that.

Got my hair cut.

I got my hair cut by Tennille yesterday.

It's been a while since I've seen her. Because of my schedule last semester, I got my hair cut once by the owner, and once at the Vidal Sassoon Academy downtown.

(They had a $10 student coupon; the haircut was good enough, but took three hours, and I had to watch the [white] [originally-from-south] teacher dress down the student, this older [white] woman who had been cutting hair for 40 years and was taking the course as a refresher and learn some new techniques... When the teacher recommended she buy some comb-razor combo gizmo for texturing hair, the student was like, "You know, my comb and a razor work just fine," and the teacher was all saccharine-sweet and was like, "Yes, but I'm speaking objectively.")

Anyhow, Tennille was telling me about how her brother ("Martel") and her sister-in-law just got back from a Paris vacation. She said they thought everyone was treated really well in France, and after I told her some stories about French racism from my one British friend, she did admit that they were always like, "Martel we know, it iz French, but ze last name, of what origin it iz?" (my accent, not hers), and that perhaps France is bad in some parts.

I also said maybe they were nice to him because they thought he was Obama, and she laughed and said that he is tall and lanky with close-cropped hair.

Also, she was talking about how (white) people get "sloppy drunk", but that doesn't seem to happen so much with (black) people, though one time she was at a club downtown they refused her (black) friend at the door because she was so drunk and she started yelling at the guard that it was her birthday (it was), and after she left they sobered her up and she got in, only to get drunk again and chew out the guards. Tennille ended up telling her that they all came out to have a good time and that she had already paid for parking, and to go pay for a cab all the way home because she wasn't going to drive her, so her friend did that.

Tennille was also saying that the club was high-class, but in the back they had these stripper poles and like jungle-gyms set up, and well-dress, beautiful (white) girls would be all sloppy drunk and dancing on them for their boyfriends, and that it was appalling.

"You should go there and see it," she was like. "It's something to see once if you live in [the city], it's just like in a movie."

Store comment.

The other day after I caught Thai food with my one lawyer friend from Missouri, I had to pick a few things up from that one grocery/convenience store in my new neighborhood that carries a lot of Mexican stuff and Ethiopian flatbreads.

As we were leaving, she oddly paused, and when we got outside, she was like, "Damn it, I wanted to hear what they were saying," because she was eavesdropping on the counterpeople, who were talking in Spanish, and the counterguy was telling one of the women that she didn't know anything because she was from Colombia.

Pronunciation mistake.

The other day I was helping out my one Hungarian actress friend with her accent for some poems she was reading for a celebration of Islamic poetry at the university...

In the middle of a poem - her pronunciation was beautiful! - she made a slight mistake with the word "horseback", so I heard her say...

The caliph rode on whore's back

That happened, honestly. And when I asked her to say that line again, she mispronounced it a second time! We had a good laugh over that one.

Update: Catalan romance.

So, my one friend with the cat was telling me about this dinner date she had with the one Catalan guy I know, who she's been dating for a while -

He had her over and he was cooking up some famous Catalan stew, and then when he ladled some out into the bowls, there were pig's feet sticking out, and he taught her how to suck the liquifying gelatin off the hooves.