Have a lot of lawyer tutorees.

My one lawyer I teach Greek to was asking me congenially how my business was going, and I told him that I had picked up another couple students for the summer, including a lawyer.

"We're like rabbits," he said.

He then said that years ago when he took an adult ed reading course on the Iliad (in Homeric Greek), like 3/4 of the class was lawyers.

I found that interesting, and wondered out loud if that's because lawyers are intellectually intense people, and they'd relax with something intellectual, but different from what they do.

He said that was possible, but he wasn't sure why, really.

1/5th chance...

I forgot -

My one Latin student is a healthcare lawyer.  Before the Supreme Court decision, he gave me his predictions: he thought it was going to be struck down, either narrowly or altogether, but that there was a 1/5th chance, he thought, that the mandate would be re-evaluated as a tax and upheld.

Guess it was that 1/5th chance!

I love Polish young people.

I really like Polish-from-Poland young people I've met in the city.  They are affable, grounded, and so very open to the world...  You get the sense from them that they suspect deep down no-one really likes them, but they try to connect anyway.
There's something deeply humble about them, and you can tell that they are the Poland of the future, whereas the deeply patriarchal John Paul II was the Poland of the past. They also are cooler than Russians, on the whole, since there doesn't seem to be so many batshit crazy ones of them, and they also don't have a chip on their shoulder from recently having been an empire. One of my missions in my bar quest is to find out where the Polish gay bar is (or at least the bar where the Polish gay guys go), since there's so many of them there *must* be one in the city, like there's several Mexican gay bars, and even a bar where the Arabic-speaking gay men go (which, incidentally, is run by an older free-spirited Moroccan woman who laughs heartily and smokes and drinks up a storm and loves everyone; the bar has no name out front, just a small window with one neon beer sign, and is sandwiched between furniture and convenience stores on this nondescript strip and even though I know to look for it I pass it by sometimes). Anyhow, I ask around whenever I meet a Polish bartender, and they always says they don't know, though they know plenty of gay bars back in Krakow, Warsaw, etc., and they had gay roommates back there, etc. One (Polish) bartender who I connected with in this 1950s looking sportsbar that had a spaceshippy crystalline interior full of silvers, whites, and flashes of firey red and deep purple even did some googling in Polish for me on her iPhone and found out about a bar in the city that Polish gays had gone to up to a month ago, when it lost its liquor license, but she couldn't find anything else, and then she got my number, since she said she'd ask her (gay) (Polish) hairdresser for me. Anyhow, the other week at this neighborhood dive bar on the far far west side of the city I ran across this kind of bitchy (Polish) (female) bartender with a stocky but not fat body and a geometric haircut like Rihanna's, and I was going to skip the question, but I asked her anyways, and she said she had a gay cousin in a different neighborhood in the city, but she didn't know of any particular bars he went to, and then she drifted off to do her work, kind of standoffishly. When me and my friend who I was at the bar with left, though, my friend was polite and called out bye to the bartender, and she said bye to my friend, and then she looked at me and was like, "Good luck!", and her eyes flashed very genuine, and you could tell that she really meant it. I love Polish young people, that was so sweet of her.

Coolest Person You've Never Heard Of, Likely.

A figure I came across in my research:

Ernestine Rose, an early 19th c. Polish immigrant who was an atheist and a prominent activist for the rights of women and others.

She did huge lecture tours while her husband (who shared her beliefs) worked and helped support her, despite the opposition of people who said that lecturing would "unsex" a woman.

I personally find it inspiring, too, that she was a second-language learner who became known for her facility in a language other than her native one.

I also find it inspiring that her face reminds me of Polish relatives I know.

Drank at a steelworkers bar.

The other Sunday me and a friend drank at a (white) steelworkers bar on the far southeast edge of the city, in a neighborhood that people who've lived in the city a long time don't even know the name of.

When we came in at like 11pm, this woman Tammy who had just come from a wake with a (female) friend and some guy who kept grabbing huge handfuls of her friend's ass, began talking our ear off, and at some point she told us not to go sit down by this majorly drunk guy towards the end of the bar, so of course we did, while she and her friend began dancing with each other in the aisle by the doorway, and her friend even kicked her leg way up above her head and kept it again the wall while she leaned back

The guy who was drinking a lot turned out to be this mid-40s Polish-American guy with a little black poodle named "Trouble", or, as he called him sometimes, "Troubski". 

The dog was on the seat next to him, and he kept scratching his ears and telling us how his last girlfriend had him up in her fancy apartment downtown but wasn't taking care of him, and he repossessed him the last time he saw her, when he saw how all the hair in the dog's ears was untrimmed.

He also said his girlfriend had had 3 abortions, and the last one really hurt him.

Then he told us about a girlfriend before that, who was Mexican and petite, "built like a fairy", and how one time they were downtown in a really nice part of town and she needed to go to the bathroom really really bad, so they popped off into this apartment building where they had a friend who turned out not to be home, but the doorman let her go up to this public bathroom way up on a high floor, so she went up there holding it really bad, and sprinting down the hall holding her buttcheeks together, and when she got to the door, the door was locked, and the next thing you know she has to go and there's no one around, so she pulls down her pants and just leans up against a planter and sprays out shit against the wall and carpet and side of the planter, then pulls her panties up, looks around to make sure no-one's there - there wasn't! - and just goes back into the elevator and leaves.

He said the panties were def. stained that night.

He then pointed to a guy across the bar, this older guy next to what looked like a (fat) Mexican-American lesbian, and told us how he owned strip clubs and the guy let him in there since he was 16, and got him all fucked up, and this was back in the 80s when you wore thong underwear, and one night he woke up back in his bed with his thong all full and wet and crunchy like drying cement, and it was full of shit, he had shit himself, they had gotten so fucked up.

He also told his his Mexican girlfriend who was "built like a fairy" had a (male) roommate who loved her story about shitting on the wall in the highrise, and always wanted to hear it, and she'd tell it to him, and he'd laugh and get a weird look in his eye.  Anyhow, one day she goes home, and there's a small, solid, perfect little turd, just sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, and she knew he put it there, so right away she called a friend and she came and helped her get all her stuff, and she moved out of that apartment and never saw the guy again.

He then was telling us more about growing up in the neighborhood, and how he grew up in the projects, partly, and had a really good black friend, and in high school it suddenly dawned on him that the reason he didn't have many other friends wasn't him, it was because he was friends with a black guy.

"I've been in this neighborhood forever," he was like, and then said his house was a few blocks south, by a railroad bridge where when his mom was a freshman in high school, the police caught her getting fucked under there by a senior, and that was the night his brother was conceived, and his mom got a severe beating by her Polish father, because the police brought her home and said they caught her fucking under the railroad bridge.

When I was in the restroom, the guy told my friend that "your boyfriend's pretty", but my friend didn't think he was trying to hit on me. Later, he was telling us about being a Marine, and how he drove to the brig a van of Marines who had gotten caught up in a making-porn-on-base meth-fucking scandal. "I don't care what you do in your free time," he was like, "But don't disrespect the uniform."

Horrible busride to the subway.

A few weeks ago I was at school late on an insufferably hot night, and I get on the bus to take to the subway to get home...

The driver is very slow, and gets caught in multiple redlights.

4 people getting on have problems with money where they have to dig in their pockets.

A (mentally ill) homeless lady doesn't have her change and wanders around the bus asking for some, and the bus driver has to pull over and talk to her several times, and yells at her to not panhandle, and then finally makes her get off the bus.

Some younger kids make fun of the homeless lady loudly, and a (black) nurse tells them sternly to stop.

A mom enters with a baby carriage (at like 9pm at night!) and yells at her other kid, and the baby begins crying.

All in all, it was quite a night, so I turn to the (black) nurse and am like, "This is quite some night, isn't it," and immediately she says to me, "Don't you start to, that could be a loved one of yours or you."

She had thought that I was making a snide comment about the homeless lady.

I just turned back and didn't respond or get into it.

Addendum.

The next day I called home, and my dad had been at the store, and when he backed out of the parking lot, his brakes weren't there. He went to the nearby garage and coasted in... Luckily he had a stickshift that allowed him to just disengage the gears, though even that seems like it would have been dangerous.