Addendum.

One of my favorite talking points I use to separate older pro-GOP Jewish people from their party is to talk about just how crazy evangelical Christians are...

I did that more in Indiana than Wisconsin, though.

One lady, I remember, said that Palin was pro-Israel.

"Have you read the Book of Revelation?", I was like.  "It's in the Christian Bible."

The woman shook her head, and she said she might have heard of it.

"They love the state of Israel because they think it'll get destroyed in a battle right before Jesus comes back.  Some crazy Christian prophet guy out in the desert wrote something like that 2000 years ago, and that's where their foreign policy comes from."

I then said that sure they might be friends, but for the wrong reasons, and you never know how that would affect things when it really came down to it.

"If there's a nuclear threat, would you really want her finger on the button?", I said, after having said McCain might die and leave Palin in charge.  "They case out devils in her church up their in Alaska, who knows what else is rattling around in her head.  You can never depend on someone like that, they're not thinking about Israel, that's for sure."

Wisc. Volunteering (2 of 2): Moms.

For whatever reason, I had a lot of moms with young kids who were undecided voters, when I volunteered in Wisconsin this past weekend.

None would identify issues, but I gave my spiel about how the economy is mine, and even though it isn't where we want it, Obama has the leadership we need, and then I said I was from Michigan, and that it would have been catastrophic if the auto industry had gone under.

"Those loans have been paid back ahead of time or on schedule, and Mitt Romney wrote an editorial 'Let Detroit Go Bankrupt'," I said.

I then said that my relatives lived near Detroit and it would have cost 1 out of 5 jobs, and where I'm originally from, it's the north part of the state with a tourist economy just like Wisconsin, and "there wouldn't have been any tourists left."

I then said Obama wasn't thinking about politics because that decision was unpopular at the time, he was thinking about what's best for the country and for the middle class.

A few of them got enthusiastic and nodded when I said stuff like that.

One 30-something lady (Mexican-American) was a bit of a devil's advocate and said she's looking at both sides, but we talked a bit, and her 30-something (white) husband came to get some Obama lit before going over to his friend's house.

"He's a rabid Republican," he's like, "I want to give him some of this and set him off."

"You sure about that?", I was like.  "He's probably got guns.  You'll be laughing, and the next thing you know, he's shooting up the ceiling."

"Concealed carry," the mom was like, smiling and joking.

"I'm not kidding you, people are nuts like that," I was like, and then I told them about a friend's dad from Terre Haute, Indiana, this short pudgy old doctor guy with white hair and moustache and glasses who's always laughing and talking, and who walks around with a handled paper shopping bag full of old old newspapers spilling out of it.

"My friend's fiancee saw that, and she thought, 'Oh, that's odd, but that's just [her fiance's name]'s dad, he thinks he'll read all those old newspapers'  Then, she talked to her fiance, and he said his dad actually carries a rifle under there, no shit."

They loved the story, and the husband laughed, and I thanked them and got going, and as I walked down the steps the husband gave his wife a kiss goodbye as she held their baby.

Wisc. Volunteering (1 of 2): Elderly White Lady.

This past weekend when I volunteered in Wisconsin, I had a mixed list, with some people being undecided voters, and others being Democrats that I might have to motivate.

At one house, there was a sign for the Dem congressman in the district, but I knocked anyhow, and this elderly (like high 80s!) white lady ("Alice") answered the door.

After my opening spiel, she was like, "Oh, you don't have to worry about us, we vote straight Democrats, but maybe I shouldn't say that so loud, you never know who's listening," and laughed.

I looked at her curiously, and then she told me that on Sunday when she was getting a ride home from (Catholic) church with friends, somehow something came up and she said she was a Democrat, and this stony silence filled the car.

"I realized I was in a car with all Republicans," she was like.  "I really had no idea."

She said that one woman broke the silence.  "I always suspected you were a Democrat," she said.

Then, "words" started, and this other old woman joined in the fray.

"It's fine you're a Democrat," she was like, "But why do you have to be so hot about it?"

Then, the old guy who was driving had to jump in, and was like, "Well, I don't think that way, but she can think whatever which she wants."

"Oh," Alice was like, "I should have gotten out of that car and walked home."

"Why didn't you?", I was like.

"I didn't think of that till later," she was like, and then she added it would have been too far for her to walk anyhow.

I then asked her if she wanted to put up lawn signs for other Democrats, and she kind of winced a bit.

"That okay," I was like, and thanked her.  "One's great, too many and your lawn looks like a used car lot."

Too Much Drinking: Curry-Whiskey Vomit on Public Transportation.

Like a week ago we had our big grad student mixer, and between drinking and Thai food at that then more drinking at the student bar, I ended up vomiting up a big heap of orange curry-color vomit all over the subway like 2 stops from home when all of a sudden my stomach got upset...

At the event, they were out of curry, so like 3 times I got sticky rice and threw it in the catering tray and mopped up the curry on that, and ate 3 huge bowls of that, then had some beer and later had 3 whiskeys at the bar.  That curry and whiskey didn't sit well around 11pm, even an hour after I had stopped drinking, and I suddenly started gagging between stops, otherwise I would have dashed out and vomited on the platform, and into a garbage can if I could.

I was really embarrassed and texted a few close friends the next day, to see if it had ever happened to them, where they threw up on public transportation.

My one Czech literature professor friend said she hadn't, and none of the 3 people she was with right then had either.

This one really kind of insane, heavy-drinking, recently-graduated Ph.D. student said he hadn't either, though he had seen it happen a few times, and my one (light-skinned black) friend from Arkansas said the same thing.

A few nights later, I was out celebrating with my one (Asian-Canadian) friend because he had just passed prelims, and we gelled with the waitress, this late 30s punk woman with dyed blonde hair who had a nursing degree but ended up hating it and went back to bartending, and I asked them if they had.

They hadn't.

-BUT-

My one (Asian-Canadian) friend said he's gotten to feeling sick on public transportation before, and it's easy to feel fine when you leave a bar, and forget you have lengthy travel ahead of you in stuffy enclosed air, whereas if you walked home you'd be fine.

The punk woman said a lot of times she's just passed out in her leather jacket and pants, and that had happened to her last week, at which point my one (Asian-Canadian) friend said that during college, a lot of times he'd pass out while undressing, and he'd wake up slumped on the bed with the light on.

Later, I found out that the punk woman loves memoirs, so I gave her recs on 2 Jonestown ones and told her to read "Heaven's Harlots".

On further reflection, I should have gotten her address and sent it to her.

Latin Students (2 of 2): Lost the homeschooler.

I think I lost the overscheduled homeschooler who didn't really know Latin all that well.

Her mom had asked me to write a year-end evaluation, which teachers often "write in the form of a recommendation", which I really couldn't do since her memorization wasn't that thorough, she would do word-order translations, and had problems with recognizing when she didn't know things and would have to double-check in a dictionary or grammar (and when she did consult those, she often came away with the wrong vocab word).

Even though we worked together for a year, she still did word order translations, and I couldn't assign homework, since she didn't have the basic skill set that would have allowed me to do so.

I said that nicely in the evaluation (not a rec) along with some mitigating positives, and ran it by my dad who did high school recs, and then I sent it to the mom in an email saying to have a year-end conference to go over it, and followed that up by text.

The mom texted me that we'd meet in 3 weeks once the schedule cleared, but she never did.

Now, it's a month in to when her daughter's term started, and no contact from them.

The daughter's last tutor sounded awful - he would assign her paragraph upon paragraph of translation, then say she didn't know anything, the mom said - and the mom said she liked her daughter studying a Latin because it was a challenge for her (her other subjects weren't), and that my style fit her daughter better.

I figure, either the eval shocked her, or the daughter finagled her way out of Latin since she hated it, since she wasn't good at it.

She really did hate it when she realized she wasn't good at it.

Right after we started, she got enthusiastic for Latin for about a month, and would read gravestones when she was on vacation with her parents and at some historic cemetary (though I don't know how she did that, she probably improvised translations off cognates and made something up that made sense).

That enthusiasm dwindled, though, when I started having to ask her how much time she spent on her homework, go over how she looked up words in dictionaries, etc.

She's a nice kid, but I think she's going to have long-term problems with anything she really has to work at, and isn't immediately good at.

Ultimately, her not doing well was never her fault, and her parents protected her from that, which isn't doing her any favors.

Latin Students (1 of 2): Couldn't ask for better.

The one faculty assistant at school who self-studied with a common Latin textbook under my direction is a *great* student: dedicated, serious, talented, and keen on memorization.

Also, he wants to read Classical texts, but is fine with Medieval and Christian texts too, rather than dismissive of them, as many people into Classical texts are.

To start out now that he's done with the textbook, we were reading some of the Carmina Burana and some easy but fun saints' lives that have condensations in the Legenda Aurea, and now we're switching out the Carmina Burana for the introduction to Ovid's "Art of Love".

Sometimes his questions are on things he's forgotten or stuff he's misanalyzed, but many times they're very perceptive and catch me off guard.  It's very much a pleasure to teach him - and I wonder if I was that sort of student back in college when I was taking Old Church Slavonic.

Very good recommendation from a prof.

Years ago, a prof who I TAed had said that if you ever have a conversation with a random person who's very interested in your topic, leave them with a text or 2 to turn to, to follow up their interests.

The other day at an (Irish) bar I met a punked-up yoga instructor who was asking me if Jesus existed, because people like Pantanjali may have been later inventions for composite texts, so I was able to recommend to her a short, scholarly-valid book about the four canonical gospels and the historical Jesus.

She was hyped, and thankful.