Dreams of a salary.

Someone the other day was saying you can't live on $30,000 a year.

I was thinking to myself, I've lived on $13,000-$16,000 for so long, I simply can't imagine having that much money, and that much stability.

Hating on the Dutch.

When I hit bar #1000, I sent out a text to a lot of people, including this one (Filipino-American) (ex-military) guy my one (light-skinned black) friend from Arkansas used to date, and who the three of us shared together my 1st epic night of bar-hopping, where we hit up 10 bars in a night, including 1 tiki bar just outside of city limits that technically doesn't count but was fun anyway.

(They had had their first date there, and both raved about it and said I'd love it - I did - and so we set up an itinerary where that was our halfway point, where we barhopped out to city limits, had a break there with ice cream rum drinks - I think I had a "fogcutter" - and then barhopped back home.)

Anyhow, it turns out that he finished up at community college on the GI bill and is now at a major state school, but it's a ton of work and he's a bit alienated from being older than other students, but he's still DJing, and over winter break is doing a Berlin - Amsterdam - the Hague junket.

I texted him that the Dutch are horrendously racist.

He texted back:

Oh well - i guess if its not wet behind the ears know it all privileged racist fraternity children i suppose must settle for those racist dutch bastards.  Haha.

I remember when we were at a Polish metal bar, he and my friend felt uncomfortable around all the Polish people, though they did take up an offer to play 2 Polish guys on foosball.

"This is very them-versus-us," my one (light-skinned black) friend joked.

"You're Team Light Brown!", I was like.

They laughed.

Silverfish.

I've found some silverfish in my apt. recently:

1) I was eating dinner late at night and one started slowly moving down the wall in my dining room...

I went to whack it, but it fell off and scurried behind a pile of books.

2) The other day I was drawing a bath, went to go do something, and came back, and when I came back, the bath was half-full, and there was a silverfish sitting on top of the water.

I got some scrap paper from my wastebasket and scooped it out, and it seemed to have been dead from the hot water.

I crushed it between the paper just to make sure, and it made a wet squish rather than a crisp one like they usually do when you crush them.  I think the water boiled it.

Broth - Bag.

This woman who I met at a bar turned out to be a restaurant manager, and we had a very long talk about making vegetable stock and having a garden in the city.

Because I love to cook cheap and with minimum waste, I found her method of keeping a tupperware full of veggie scraps (onion, carrot, and celery ends, garlic and onions skins, etc.) in order to boil them up into veggie stock once a week very inspiring.

So, for like the past month, I collect my vegetable scraps and then boil them down once a week, and for the past several weeks after I cooled the broth, I poured it into a ziploc freezer bag that I kept in my fridge.

The other week when I made lentil soup, though, I had forgotten to thaw out the bag, and so I poured bits of warm water into it before dumping it out into the pot, but I tried to force out the big frozen chunk from the bag too soon, and I tore a small hole in the bag and can't reuse it.

That really bothered me, the waste of that bag.  I had saved that bag from something else in order to reuse it, but because I wasn't careful, I could only reuse it once.

Priests and nuns in Kenya.

The other week I met an anthropology Ph.D. student at a reception function at school, and we started talking and he told me about a friend of his who works in western Kenya who has gotten to know some priests real well, and he's been to these wild parties where the priests are sitting around with nuns on their lap and people are passing around and swigging communion wine.

I told him that I've heard stories about African priests in the U.S., where a lot take the system for a ride and don't take anything seriously.

"My impression is that African priests are a regular shitshow," he was like.

Election Reactions (2 of 2): Barhopping.

Since I'm done volunteering, it's time to catch up with bars.

Like that week on Thurs., I took a bike trip to the far west side of the city, to an Italian-American neighborhood then a Polish neighborhood.

At the bar of an Italian restaurant, there were all these white guys in expensive-looking cheap suits talking about the election.

"I think what happened is that black people finally woke up," one guy was saying, "and saw that Romney would take away their food stamps."

He also was saying that he's socially liberal and doesn't "give a fuck about abortion", and is glad that evangelicals are a dying breed in the GOP.

Later, at this lowscale tiki bar where there were two working-class (white) men and an older (Polish) bartender working amidst thatch walls, aquariums, and fans made out to look like palm leaves, the bartender had on FoxNews.

When some segment said how married women voted for Romney more than Obama, she was like, "Of course, they are responsible, they do not want something for nothing."

Later, when there was footage of Sandra Fluke on, she yelled out "slut!" and "n*gg*r lover!" at the screen.

The other guys were union, though, and pushed back a little...  When FoxNews was saying how Romney was a nice guy and Obama cheated by tarring him, the one was like, "You mean cheated like keeping all your money in the Cayman Islands?  Hey, that's not fair!".

Election Reactions (1 of 2): Friend from home.

My one friend from home who runs an integrated domestic violence - homelessness shelter for her county was saying by text that after the election, she feels like she won the lottery.

I was saying that it's great how all the batshit crazy GOP guys were defeated, and she texted back:

Fuck yeah it is!!!  How terrible when you have to stay up to see if "all the rape guys" were defeated

I then was saying that our polity would be so much better if we had a "one ovary - one vote" policy, which she agreed with, though I then said that there might be problems with women voting the wrong way, because for women nowadays, "no" means "yes".