Some big nastiness.

Last week when I was sick and staying late at the library at school writing some stuff up, I hacked up a piece of snot and spit it in the waste basket near me.

I then walked to the bathroom hacking and snorting a bit, and as I got inside the bathroom door, I felt this big piece of snot start sliding down the back of my throat...

And then it stopped, halfway.

I had this big cold, clammy piece of snot sitting there, resting partially on the back of my tongue, and no matter how I snorted, it didn't move.

I started gagging a bit, and I moved my jaw and tongue to try to catch the hunk of snot the side of my teeth and drag it out, but it just kind of slowly snapped back, and never moved.

Finally, after like a minute, my nose and throat started watering somehow, and it slid out while I was taking the piss I had really had to take, and I spat it in the urinal.

It fell into the plastic dividers holding the pink urinal cake and slipped away, so I didn't even get to see how big it was. I bet it felt bigger than it actually was.

Lottery dreams.

In the Irish and Irish-American and Italian-American neighborhood, everyone is very (white) and working-class, and seems to be Republican.

I was at this one trashy Irish pub, and everyone was buying lots of Megamillion tickets for the record jackpot, and people were very seriously talking about how if they won the lotto, they would be free.

For some reason, I found the way they said that strangely beautiful, and almost began to cry.

Tutoring Concern.

It's kind of a concern for me that my home schooler is so fixated on standardized tests.

She is so hung up on making sure she can game a test and get a 650 Latin Sat II score (which would count for language credit at her top-choice college, even though she doesn't need it since she's got that covered with her phenomenal French Sat II score), that she's not even worried about developing long-term translation skills...

She just kind of expects me to teach to the test, even though I've identified long-term problems with guessing that contribute to problems on practice tests and would blow her out of the water in a college classroom (she still has word order problems where she translates in order a lot, and she doesn't look up words and frequently guesses at forms, but she's good at the process of elimination on multiple choice tests, so she tests well, even though that that sort of test is not at all what would happen in college).

Today I was trying to tell her that memorizing forms and working on translation passages would help shore up the weakest areas I saw affecting her practice tests, but she didn't seem that convinced.

I'm doing this anyhow, though; I really do think these skills and concern for detail would help her do well on a practice test, and there's no way I'd let her get into a college classroom and be embarrassed like she would be if she entered one tomorrow, after having had Latin for 2.5 years.

Overall, though, I really do find it mind-boggling that someone can get very high scores on a Latin SAT II test, and not be able to produce a good translation of a simple Latin passage with the help of a grammar and dictionary. There's something majorly wrong with that high school culture.

My trip to a bar deep in the (black) part of town.

My trip to a (black) bar on the deep South Side was not as eventful as you’d think.

My one (white) colleague from Mississippi’s band had a gig in an Irish-American enclave just to the southwest of there, so I took my bike on the subway, got off a stop early, and biked till I saw this one bar I had heard about.

There were no good places to lock up my bike, but there was a sign just around the corner, so I locked it up there, and then tapped on the window to be let in (there was no buzzer, like at a lot of these places).

The (black) (middle-aged) (tough-looking) (bearded) bartender came up and let me in, and it was just him in the bar at that point.

I introduced myself and got a beer, and he said he kept the door locked since he was waiting for bank, and they do that anyways till more people get in there, and then they keep it open.

I asked if there was a buzzer, and he said no, people just tap on the window or wait till he notices them, and then he lets them in.

I then gave him my story, about how people at the (black) neighborhood bar in my old neighborhood had mentioned this bar and another one, and how I had always wanted to go there, so I since my friend’s band was playing just south, I took the chance to go.

At that point, he asked me where my bike was, and I told him I had locked it around the corner.

“You think it’s safe?”, I was like.

“In this neighborhood, you never know,” he was like, and he told me if I got it he’d keep it in the back room for me while I had my beer, so I went outside to get it.

Right by it was a ramp sidewalk, and there was a public transportation van letting out a(n old) (black) guy in leather jacket with tons of finger rings in a wheelchair, so I said excuse me and went to the bar.

After I got out of putting my bike in the backroom, the (old) (black) guy was there....

There was a beautiful hand-painted poster on the wall for Hilda’s birthday, and so people were gathering that night at the bar for it... The woman was the bartender’s sister, and there was even some food trayed up in the back for her.

I introduced myself to the (old) (black) guy, and somehow he and the bartneder started talking about women, and the kind of woman who calls you up and wants you to come by, no matter what time of night it is and how bad the parking is.

Later, some other customers came in, and the bartender took care of them, and I introduced myself to them too...

It wasn’t so much that it was a (black) bar that made it awkward, but that it was a regulars bar, and it was going to be a birthday party for a patron that night.

Anyhow, I talked to the bartender a bit more, and he said the other bar that I’d heard about would be no problem, that there was a buzzer on the door and I could go in there no problem, and “it would be cool.”

He also asked me if he could ask me a question, and when I said yes, he was like, “Do people ever tell you you look like Steve Kerr?’, and when I said I had gotten that before, he said that he had thought at first I looked like someone he worked in a steel mill with, but then he realized I looked like a celebrity.

Later, when Hilda came in, she introduced herself to me, but I was finishing my beer and I wanted to get my bike out before the bar got too crowded, so I didn’t talk to her much...

(Would I have stuck around longer if there were more [black] women in the bar? Otherwise, at that point, the patrons were all male.)

As I left, she was telling someone she thought I was a worker in the anti-violence prevention program active in the neighborhood, and the bartender held open the double set of doors as I got my bike out through them.

He had already told me a better set of direction to bike to my one (white) colleague from Mississippi’s gig, and then was like, “Hey, next time you’re in the neighborhood, stop by.”

And he meant it!

Some bars (3 of 3): Last bar of the night.

The next bar after that was a tad run-down and had mostly old men and some Poles as clientele, and the bartender was this (30-ish) (Polish) (woman) with a modernistic dress that had prominent dark green circles jutting out around her arms near her shoulders like the seals on a spacesuit, and a squat cone of hair very deliberately set on one half of her head and pointing outwards.

I just sat and drank my beer quietly, and after taking a piss and getting ready to go, I start walking towards the door, and I see this (middle-aged) (female) head with her neck right at bar level behind the bar, and she’s talking to a Pole and is saying something in Polish that sounds like “Pszoncz pszoncz.”

And then, I remember that the woman who cleaned bars had told me like an hour ago about bars in the neighborhood, and said that one was owned by a midget Polish woman.

Some bars (2 of 3): Convo with a bar cleaner.

At the next bar, which had a lot of Poles there and this central bar and pink neon and mirrors on a lot of the walls and a pool table, I sat down, and thought I recognized this brunette woman towards the door.

“Excuse me,” I was like, “But weren’t you at the last bar?”

It turns out that she was, and she was waiting for her boyfriend to show up, and we just started chatting.

I told her my bullshit story of why I was in the neighborhood, that I had to return a hand blender to a friend and this was the only time I could do it, and since I was out this way I took a little bit of a further ride on my bike and decided to check out some bars.

(I always have to have a story like that; it’s to disarm suspicions, and it does.)

She was saying that she cleans bars for a living and drinks too much, but it’s a nice life, since you can get fucked up and then you go clean the bars at 2am when you have a nice buzz on, but if you have to clean a bar that closes at 4am, that kind of sucks, since you’re already getting tired and hungry and just want to go home to go to sleep.

She also was asking me how old she looked, and when I said 36, she was like, “God bless you!”, and told me that she was 46.

“No shit,” I was like, “Don’t say that, people will think you’re lying.”

“That’s right!”, she was like, “I’m actually 56!”, and she laughed hard and slapped my arm.

Later, her boyfriend came in, the older (white) guy with a goatee and an oxygen tank. He was very suspicious of me, so I kind of drank up and got ready to go, though the woman kept laughing and saying how much she loved me to him and anyone who would listen.

When I got up, she pushed her chair back, and his oxygen tank got knocked over, and the next thing I know, she was throwing her hands up in the air and was all like, “It’s gonna blow, it’s gonna blow!”, and laughing uproariously.

Some bars (1 of 3): Big Shank's.

When I was barhopping a couple of weeks ago, I was at this place called “Big Shank’s Friendly Tavern”, an old liquor store – tavern with a round wooden bar, and beneath the bar this old wooden slotted partitioned cabinet to keep cigarettes in, and bags of Combos and other snacks for sale cheap, and these old wooden locked plate-glass windows on the walls with liquor behind them.

The bartender was this older kind of spacey (white) woman with short blonde hair, and the clientele was old men, except for this one brunette woman down the bar with this (white) guy with a devilish goatee and an oxygen tank.

Towards the time when I’m getting read to go, I ask the bartender why the place is called “Big Shank’s”.

“Because the owner took over the bar from his father and that’s the owner,” she was like, “Big Shank.”

“And why is he called Big Shank?”, I was like.

“All his life people have called him that,” she was like, “Big Shank.”

“And did he get that nickname from somewhere, or something?”, I was like.