Belated Trip Home News (1 of 2): Gift.

On my trip home to Michigan over Labor Day, I went out to dinner with my one friend from high school, his wife (who used to be my neighbor), and their two kids.  Somehow I mentioned I was reading nun memoirs, and he said he had a book for me and got my address, then sent me this:

 Apparently, it's a self-published book, and it's about a nun from my part of the state who died under mysterious circumstances in the early 20th century, perhaps from having an affair with a priest and having an illegal abortion.

It's one of the most thoughtful gifts I've ever received.

Odd Dream of Wrong Things.

I recently had another dream of wrong things -

I dreamed I was at the salon that I usually go to, and some (Japanese) woman (not the owner of the actual salon) gave me a haircut, but left everything longer than I wanted and kind of shaggy and ugly.

Cool bartender.

The other week I went out and hit up bars while doing outlines for a piece I'm writing, though that ended by the 3rd bar.

The 4th and last bar of the night was just up a side street from a strip on the way home that I had entirely hit up...

On a whim, I decided to bike north to see if there was anything up there amidst the lights I could see in the distance, even though other bartenders in the area had told me of all the other bars, I thought.

Like within half a block, I could pick out a beer sign, and there was this dirty-looking bar with an old dirty-looking light-up sign that looked absolutely fantastic.

I walk in, and the bar is full of middle-aged (white) and (hispanic) people, and at the bar by the entrance behind the counter is this shorter older woman with dyed blonde hair ladling little paper cups full of like an orange Kool-Aid, and is putting them on tray after tray after tray.

I chit-chat with her, and it turns out she's the owner, and was prepping Jello shots for the next night's special (Friday $1 jello shots!).

She was an Olympic nut, and that's why she had a $1 Olympia beer special, for the entire duration of the Olympics.

She also had said she always decorates the place, and there had been a 25-foot American flag down the ceiling of the bar, and paper torches and Olympic rings put up on the walls.

The late middle-aged (white) (male) (dude) bartender was chatty, too.  Since it was my 1st time in the bar, he gave me a shot of my call, and we did Jaeger together (I said I was drinking what he was drinking, and he drinks Jaeger).

He gave me a $5 discount card for the nearby strip club, and said that his bike got stolen, so he skateboards to work.

== NEWS FLASH ==

I'm going to see Madonna tonight, with my one lawyer friend from Missouri.

It was a hassle to buy tickets and since the only tickets that were together were practically behind the stage, I ended up buying separate tickets on opposite ends of the stadium (erp).

I hope she doesn't mind! 

I guess I'll find out tonight.

Clever bartender.

The other weekend I went to a (new) bar and presented my (Michigan) driver's license to the bartender, and he was like, "So you're a Yooper, eh?"

I immediately was confused and was like, "No!", since my hometown is from the northern lower peninsula.

(A "Yooper" is someone from the "Upper Peninsula" a.k.a. "The U.P."...  Though I vote in the city, I've never converted my driver's license to this state's, since I don't have a car and it's not worth the money, since the date on my other license is good.)

"Ok, you're good," he was like.

That made me pause, and when he came back, I asked him if he did that every time he saw a Michigan license, and he admitted that that was his test, since people who are really from Michigan have an instant "Yes!" or "No!" response, whereas if people pause, he knows it's likely fake, and if they're like, "A what?", he just takes that license right away.

He then said that the biggest amount of fake licenses he saw were fake Michigan licenses, and he pulled out a couple ones from over by the register to show me, and we compared them with mine to see how chintzy they were.

Addendum - Recent Sex Study.

I forgot -

After the recent sex study on arousal patterns of men in relation to she-males, I was chit-chatting with the one grad student and was asking him about the one study they were going to do on arousal patterns in relation to children and adolescents.

Long ago, I remember I had talked with the one professor about it, since it's been something he's wanted to study for a while, and when I had seen him, he said he had figured out the solution, to not have nude photos like his other studies, which mostly use porn, but rather pictures of people in bathing suits, since that got around a lot of legality issues.

As the grad student said, though, they still had to clear all of their pictures through the FBI, and that made things drag on.

Plus, when they were doing searches for pictures of children in bathing suits online, a lot of time they would come across pornographic material and they had to log it and report it to the authorities, which was a huge thing.

Lastly, they mostly just had their one lab manager do it, and it really really bothered her to come across child pornography, and she kind of broke down.

"In retrospect," the one grad student was like, "We should have spread that responsibility out."

So, even though they had sent out a preliminary questionnaire to me for that study over a year ago, it's pretty much dead in the water, it just fell apart.

Dream of decay.

The other week I dreamed that by the dishes piled up on the side of my sink there was this watermelon, and as I pick it up, I noticed it's all dark green and moist-looking, and the top is beginning to cave in a bit and get wrinkled, and I knew I kept it out too long and it had become rotten...

(I keep a watermelon or 2 on hand during the summer by the corner in my dining room, though I've never had one rot...  I also have dishes piled up most of the time around my sink, since I don't have much counter space.)

New Greek student!

I'm excited, I have a new Greek student!

She's a Latin teacher at one of the city's magnet schools, and had studied Greek a long time ago in college, but had mostly worked on Latin and had never felt like she got a handle on it.

So, now she's setting out to re-learn it, and maybe down the road she'd start up a  Greek program at her school; oddly, she said, there's no obvious certification for that, like there is with Latin, so she's just setting out to re-learn Greek and then she'll figure out things from there.

She's very motivated, and she says she likes how I can make meaningful comparisons between Latin and Greek b/c of my linguistics background.

Hopefully, this will work out...  And it will be a lot of work for me, since I'll have to more carefully re-memorize paradigms as I shepherd her through the textbook!  I don't have to do that with my Latin students I'm taking through textbooks, but with Greek I do, there's so many irregular forms.