More from my mom on politics (1 of 2): Birth control.

My mom was really really disgusted by what Rush Limbaugh said about that one (female) Georgetown law student who testified re: birth control, and ticked at Mitt Romney for not directly condemning what Limbaugh said.

Conversely, she was very very impressed by how Obama handled everything, and called the girl personally. She liked how he said that her parents should be proud, and that he has daughters and doesn't like to see them attacked (which actually irked me; I found those comments kind of paternalistic).

I pressed my mom a bit, and she admitted that birth control "isn't her issue", but she never thought she'd see it questioned again during her lifetime.

Good advice from a friend.

A while ago, my one friend with the cat had told me not to automatically set lower rates for ph.d. students who come to me for Greek or Latin tutoring / private lessons, since there's a lot of ph.d. students out there with money.

So, last week a guy emailed me b/c his mom had died and he had missed 3 weeks of class and was hoping I could review grammar help him catch up, etc., so I wrote back, sent him my resume, and then said I charge $65/hour to show up and tutor, "though it's negotiable depending on circumstances, so don't be scared off by the price if it seems high."

He wrote back saying it was much, and counter-offered $50/hour, which I happily took, because I would have done it for $20/hour, if I had to state a rate for someone pleading poverty!

My one friend with the cat really did give me good advice.

2 coffee shop stories.

1) The other weekend after a Saturday Latin lesson, I get home to unpack my bag, and realize I don't have my dictionary with me.

So, Sunday I go back, and after checking all the bookshelves - the workers said it might have gotten put up there with their collection of used books - I look, and it's just sitting on the long table by where I had been the previous day.

2) For some reason, I was talking the other day with the (British) worker at that same coffee shop about how he worked in special ed before getting married and moving here last year, and he told me about one time he was working with a special-needs kid and was leaning in to help him, and the kid just looks up and coughs directly in this mouth.

DONE WITH HEBREW HOMEWORK.

I just got done with Hebrew homework. The last month, the workload grew exponentially, where homework began taking not 1-1.5 hours, but rather 2.5 per assignment - and there were 3 classes and thus 3 assignments per week! And that was in addition to study time nec. for each class.

I'm going to say something about that, nicely, on the class review sheet. The homework started to displace nec. study time, I felt.

Though, I have to say, the class ended well - one of the last exercises was translating imperatives, and so I was able to accurately translate (no joke) this one causative imperative with a masculine singular direct object suffix as -

MAKE (masc. sing.) HIM GO DOWN

- which would be more useful in Modern Hebrew, but is still fun anyhow.

Bar night (2 of 2): Another restaurant bar.

After the minimalist Italian restaurant bar, I went to this swanky restaurant bar in a converted fire house, and had to walk in through this vast foyer with a upwinding staircase and take a left to get to this nice bar part with a wood bar and tables with white tableclothes, and a jazz trio playing over on the far side of the room.

There was only one seat at the bar - right at the end, by the server area - and there was even less room there, because two (fat) (white) women having a glass of wine and hors d'oeuvres had their chairs scooched out, and the one with her back to me was majorly into my space.

I sucked it up and ordered a beer, though, and sat and listened to the band and kind of stared off into space.

At some point, the (white) (gay) bartender was asking me and several patrons if we found Morgan Freeman's voice soothing, and somehow we started talking about comedy, and he kept going off about how great Sacha Baron Cohen's comedy is, because it teases out from people what discriminatory -ssh-l-s they are, and they don't even realize it.

Right when he was telling me about the character Bruno getting all these drunk frat boys to pose more and more sexually at the beach, this(mid-30s) (white) (blonde) (open-faced) yuppie woman comes up to the server area to get takeout, and she immediately starts saying to the bartender, who she seems to know well, "I don't know about you, but when I went to school, the most homophobic frat boys were the ones who got it on the most with each other."

Then, she talked about how she went to the state's flagship campus, and she had found out that the guys would just sit around and jerk off to porn.

"Girls don't do that!", she was like.

Somehow, we started talking, and she asked me what I do, and when I said that I studied religious studies, the woman started telling me that it might seem odd, but she reads a lot about death, and what did I think about death.

I told her that I think more about what other people think about death, and she said she reads a lot of books about near death experiences, and always looks for similarities, since that's what probably heaven is like.

"Or," I was like, "Those regions of heaven the people get to," and I raised the possibility that their individuality might not continue, and the ones who get absorbed in totally can never make it back.

"Right," she said, thoughtfully.

I also added that near death experiences were a relatively recent cultural phenomena mostly attributable (sp.?) to a few bestsellers - at least the stereotypical ones about going towards the light - and so it's hard to tease out what's genuine, and what's the result of our expectations when that physiological phenomenon happens.

Then, she leaned in, and was like, "I've always felt very strongly, too, that there are forces for good and forces for evil in the world, but maybe that's my being raised Catholic," and then she added that even though she goes to mass, she's not "one of those Catholics", and that her 6-year old even said in school the other day "Mommy takes a pill every day so I don't have a brother or sister."

"So why do you believe in forces for evil?", I was like. "Have you had experiences?"

She then said that she's always had these odd experiences, and though this will sound stupid, that at her high school prom night after-party, there was a drawing for a microwave, and right when the person put their hand in the hat to draw a name, she felt something coursing through her body, and she knew that she had won the microwave, which she did.

She also said that she's a real estate agent, and she gets bad feelings a lot in houses and will never go in them alone, but always waits for the clients first, and then she said that at her and her husband's house, they had a special door constructed for their cat so it could go out from the mudroom into the garage, where there was a little wire cage on the floor with a litterbox, and one time she was out in the garage with the top of the cage off cleaning the litterbox, and she broke out in a cold sweat and just incredibly tensed up, and she knew that there was something "nasty" behind her, but that whatever she should do, she shouldn't turn around.

So, she slowly finished cleaning the litter box, slowly walked inside, and locked the door, without ever turning around.

"And the house was only built in the early 90s, and I know the family who built it and then the lesbian couple who owned it after them, so nothing weird has happened there, so the spirit must have followed me or something, they do that."

Then, she explained that she and her mother and her sister went to a group of psychics that were visiting her town and doing group readings, and at a group reading one looked down at her and was like, "What do you do?", and she demurred and was like, "I'm a consultant," and the guy said, "Well, whatever you do, you go in a lot of houses, and you should know that spirits hitchhike on you because you're very open," and then he said something about how the spirits could be either good or bad.

Another time, she said, back in high school she and friends were doing a Ouija board in a room in a house where a girl had committed suicide, and when they asked the dead girl to make a sign, these huge sharp violent raps happened on the outside window.

"I don't know why we did that," she was like, "But I'm never touching those things now, and I've told my daughter she'll never touch one either."

She also said that she's surprised how many people have these experiences, they only need to tell you, and that her dad's friend who he jogged with stopped him one day, and was like, "You know, there's something I need to tell you," and then started saying how his house had been haunted for years, but he had been too scared to ever tell anybody.

For one thing, he had seen from far away this girl run into the living room at night, and had thought it was his middle daughter out of bed, so he went to go make sure she was tucked in again, and she was in her room, all tucked in and sound asleep.

For another thing, one night the guy and his wife were in bed and their door was cracked open, and this blue-green light from the living room got really really bright really really slowly, and then died down really really slowly till it went away. They were scared and stayed in bed, and the next night, the guy sat in the living room in the dark for hours seeing if car lights or turning the tv on and off would make anything sort of similar light, but it didn't.

For a third thing - "and I don't remember this, I was 7, though my parents say I used to tell them about it" - the guy's oldest son had an imaginary friend who he would talk about incessantly, and who he would go into the closet to talk with.

Lastly, one time at dinner, their middle daughter just started crying uncontrollably and putting her face in her hands and being like, "Don't let the bad man hurt me, don't let the bad man hurt me," and when she wouldn't stop and they asked where the bad man was, she threw up her hand to point out the kitchen window, and when they looked up to the window, there was this tooth sitting on the counter that the oldest son had lost, and the tooth exploded.

"I'm glad I was able to tell you these things now," her dad's jogging partner said to him.

"And you can never bring these things up with clients!", she said. "You're never supposed to tell them about a stigmatized house."

She also explained how people in her family have seen things, like her one aunt had said she had seen her dead husband in the night and he said "everything would be okay, and not to be scared", and then her aunt passed away two days later.

Also, her grandfather was in a coma, and her mom had told him not to worry, that he could go say hi to her dead twin brother now, and when she said that, tears just started streaming from his eyes, though their grandfather was supposedly completely comatose.

"My grandmother is actually going to die soon," she said, and explained that she had some heart condition that they couldn't do surgery on since she was too weak, so they told her last week that she has less than six months to live. "I don't know how I can do this," she was like, "But I really want to set some signals up with her, so she can reach out to me later, if she can."

"No pressure," she added, after a pause.

(She had been reading Jonathan [sp.?] Edwards [sp.?] and agreed with me that he's a bit full of it, but she likes some of his ideas.)

Then, I raised the possibility of demons, and told her about how there's this theory of demons that they can't be everywhere at once like God, but they can travel quickly, and that's why they can maybe predict a river rising, if they were upstream and saw high water there and then visited you and made that "prediction", but they might err if they "predict" someone will come visit, because though they might have seen that person set out, when they're telling this to you, they might not notice that that person got distracted from their journey and turned aside.

"And how would you know about those signals if they get made, that it wasn't made by a demon who watched you make that pact with your aunt?"

"Good point," she was like.

I then asked her how she knew not to turn around when she was cleaning out the litter box, and she said she just did, and when I asked her what she expected to see, she said she really has no idea, she just knew not to turn around.

Then, I told her about a priest I know who once entered a room and saw someone in the shape of a man, but covered with short dark bristly hair like a gorilla, who blinked at him dumbly and then disappeared.

"He said that demons, if you see them, are mostly lower level and very dumb, so not to worry about them," I was like.

"I know," she said, "But they still worry me. I would totally freak if something like that happened to me, and I turned around and saw a gorilla guy."

"Well," I was like, and then began to explain to her that one of the common misconceptions about demons is that if you don't mess with them, they won't mess with you.

"But, exorcists say, that's just wrong. The thing to understand about demons" - and at this part I leaned in - "they're already doing everything in their power to harm you at every single moment of the day, whether you think about them or not, whether you can see them or not."

I leaned back in my barstool and looked around, and was like, "They're trying to harm us now, you know, we just haven't been thinking about it."

She was quiet, and then said that she found that oddly comforting.

I then reminded her about using the sign of the cross, and maybe getting some holy water the next time that she was at a shrine, and maybe to cross herself with it frequently, just putting a bit of the holy water on the tips of her fingers like you do with perfume, before she crosses herself.

She then said that she has this recurring dream where she's surrounded by something she can't see but is violently evil, and she's just screaming the Our Father or the Hail Mary at the top of her lungs.

So, I told her about this one (Mexican-American) bartender I met who had been oppressed by a demon who would lie on top of her like in sexual intercourse, and she finally was able to fend the demon off by thinking, "I rebuke you by the blood of Christ," as her evangelical neighbor had recommended

"You know creative visualization?", I was like.

"Yes!", she was like.

"Well," I was like, "Maybe you should practice saying in your mind, 'I rebuke you by the blood of Christ, and command you to leave,' so that way the next time you have your dream, maybe you'll be able to do that and you'll finally be left alone."

She nodded, and obviously liked the idea.

But, it was getting late, and our conversation was dying down, so I had the last of my (second) beer - the bartender had given me a free second one during the middle of the conversation! - and I said nice to meet her and left awkwardly, while she finished her glass of (red) wine that the bartender had slid in front of her at the beginning of our conversation.

Bar night (1 of 2): Restaurant bar.

Last Thursday after an art exhibit opening I went to downtown, I went to a few nicer bars since I was dressed up.

The first was the bar in a modern, minimalist Italian restaurant, where I had actually been for a reception several years ago during the conference.

Like no-one was at the bar, but I got a beer anyway and read a newspaper...

The bartender was this late 30s (white) woman, who I heard call out to one (young) (muscled) (Mexican) waiter "Carlos!" in a distinct Spanish accent to catch his attention, and when that failed, started calling out sweetly, "Carlito..."

After a while, me and her started talking, and she told me that the business at the bar had dried up since they lost their liquor license for 5 weeks back in the fall; they used to have regulars and the place was packed, but the new mayor has been pulling licenses on back taxes, and since one of the owner's other restaurants was behind, they lost their license for a bit and all their regulars drifted to other places.

She also said she's surprised at how bad restaurant owners are with money. At one place she used to work, the owner had allowed like over 20 different people to write checks, and she didn't know how many were out there and then her account would dip and she'd bounce check after check until she realized that was happening.

"She called me up in her cigarette voice and asked me why that was happening to her," she said. "So, I told her to keep better track of her money and not have so many people be able to write checks, and she said to me, 'You're not my financial manager.'"

She also said that the owner of the current place's other couple restaurants have closed, since they were big and with elaborate decorations, and people don't go for that now; when they go out to eat, they want to be at someplace minimalist so they don't feel like they're spending money, even if they're spending money.

Then, somehow I found out that she was a ph.d. student who dropped out of her archaeology program this year, and had excavated in Peru.

I CAN'T STOP!!!

So this past week was Week #53, and I thought I was going to be able to take it easy.

But, I went to 13 or 14 new bars (can't remember right now; I don't have my "BAR LOG" in front of me).

I really can't stop going to new bars, it's become such a habit to slip in a couple here and there when I have a spare evening or hour or two.

I do think I'll be more easily able to *not* go to bars and go to other stuff (like movies), though, if I have competing options.

Though, we'll see what happens when I actually face that choice.

Gym Story (2 of 2): Same gym reading.

On Monday, I was changing in the gym locker room, and was tying my shoes and had the book "The Ethical Slut" face-up on the bench beside me, when this (white) guy who had finished changing next to me was like, "Wow, what a book."

"Yeah," I was like. "It is. It's one of the classics of polyamory."

"You know, " he was like, "I didn't even know about that, until this girl I fucked last week," and then he told me about how he picked up some lawyer at a bar and took her home, and then after he fucked her, she pushed him away, and was like, "No feelings, no feelings!".

Then, she explained that she was a polyamorist.

He also said there was this girl he fucked a couple months ago, and it was kind of weird the same way too, so he's wondering if she was also a polyamorist.

I then explained to him the overlap between gamer - sci fi/fantasy fan - neopagan culture, and said that they may have been visualizing him as a deity such as the Horned God while they fucked him.

"I teach this stuff," I was like, and introduced myself, and the guy turned out to be an MBA student.

He also let it drop that he's open to a lot of stuff, and did both men and women in college, but that this kind of stuff is just out there, he thinks, though he's fascinated by it.

So, I gave him a book recommendation, and my number, and said we should meet for drinks after he's done some reading, because "I could just go on about this shit forever."