2 recent jokes.

1) Whenever people around school tell me they're busy, I've now started being like, "You're busy? I don't even have time to cut myself!"

2) The other week I was in the grad school coffee shop and I was chit-chatting with the workers I know, and I mentioned a matinee I was going to on the weekend and invited them along to join me.

"I'd like to," this one masters student said, "But I'm actually flying home to California for a funeral."

"What's the movie about?", this other doctoral student asked.

"Oh, about a donkey in a small French village, and how he's treated depending on who his owners are," I was like. "I think he gets beaten a lot."

"Why would anyone want go see that?", a 3rd coffee shop worker was like.

"To make people who go to funerals feel fortunate," I was like, and they all had horrified looks on their faces, but were laughing in spite of themselves.

Why I want to go to Spain.

Why would I want to go to Spain? A few reasons -

1) Montserrat.

2) That famous medieval pilgrimage site of St. James.

3) To see Barcelona and the architecture of Gaudi.

4) To see what the culture is like, after I've met so many Spaniards; they're very enthusiastic and dramatic and engaged with the world and wear bright happy colors, so I think I'd like to be there.

5) By the time I get there, I bet I'd overlap with the Catalan, that one Spanish lit grad student ("Jesus"), and this Spanish lit junior professor I know, so I'd have mini-trips to go on.

6) That one giant mosque.

7) The possibility of going on a trip across to the north of Morocco, which "I'd love to visit again; I really loved visiting Morocco".

Bus-waiting story.

When I was waiting for a bus the other weekend, I was checking its arrival time using a texting feature, and when I figured that out, I told a (Mexican) guy who was there and was the only other person waiting for the stop.

On the bus, there was only one open seat, with two places, oddly, so we laughed and both sat down.

He said bye when I left, in a friendly (non-flirty) way.

I find local (Mexican) people very nice and considerate, if you're considerate of them, especially the less English they speak. My guess is that people write them off a lot.

"I didn't think till after..."

I forgot -

So that one (Italian) post-doc I was talking with mentioned somehow that his father is his hero, since he has no hands and manages to do everything.

His father, he said, was playing with friends as a kid, and they unearthed an unexploded bomb from WWII, and it went off, and he ended up losing his hands.

His dad paints and hikes and drives and types and everything, though, and is not sorry for himself at all.

I didn't think till after of that one joke -

Q: How do you shut an Italian up?

A: Cut off his hands.

Upset stomach story.

The other week my one lawyer friend from Missouri had the flu and was home for a number of days, and then finally she was feeling better, and went out to eat with a neighbor of hers, though she just ordered sweet potato fries, since she thought they wouldn't be too hard on her stomach, being a starch and not greasy at all.

Later that night, though, she was lying down at home on her couch, and all of a sudden she felt like throwing up, and she got up and was sprinting to the bathroom and couldn't hold it in, and all of a sudden she just puked up huge bouts of orange puke all over her living room carpet.

BIG NEWS OF THE WEEKEND!!!

There was a frontpage article on the city's main tabloid about the decreasing number of neighborhood bars, and they said that since 2009 tavern licenses in the city have held steady at around 1200.

It was funny, since the previous night I was just telling some people that I'd be surprised if there were more than 1200 bars in the city, I actually said that number.

Though, I'm also counting bar areas in restaurants where it's okay to come in and hang out and get a drink, so I probably underestimated when *I* said 1200; I figure that that increases the total number of bars by like around 25%, to somewhere like 1500 (maybe 1600?).

Hebrew drudgery.

My Hebrew class is now taking up 15+ hours a week, between classtime, homework, and review time.

We're going over so many paradigms so quickly, that I feel I'm forgetting them as fast as I'm learning them.

Because now is not the time to let everything slip, I'm spending extra time reviewing everything, which I think is displacing my other work and increasing my stress level, since I do that on the weekends sometimes, and it really eats into my weekend.

Though, like my one lawyer friend from Missouri said, "Who else ever says, 'Hebrew is really getting me down'?"

Hebrew fun.

The other day we were parsing verb forms, and someone asked how to translate this one stem of the verb, and the instructor was like, "Oh, something like, 'You were served.'"

I don' know why I added this - I usually don't crack jokes in class - but, since the verb could also have a reflexive meaning, I was like, "Or, 'You served yourselves,' like at McDonalds."

For some reason, everyone found that really funny.

I wonder if it was my delivery, which was very slow and deadpan, since it was so early in the morning.