Unprofessional.

The one dynamic non-profit labor place whose head I met a couple times and where I looked into volunteering at flaked out on me.

I sent the resume in to the head, she passed it off to a staffer, and after one email from the staffer the staffer never emailed me back again.

I called a week later to follow up, and that call was never returned.

It's been like 4-5 weeks.

The non-profit head said they're picky about volunteers since it can be so much work to get them set up on work to do, but the whole thing just seemed like so much unprofessionalism.

I hope that if someone from an alderman's office calls them, they don't let that slip through the cracks!

My dad turned 69.

The other week my dad turned 69 years old.

Like I did for my mom's birthday earlier this year, I called him the night before, so I could be the first to wish him a happy birthday.

"Did you ever think when you were a kid making lame jokes about 69 that one day you would actually be that age?", I asked him.

"No," my dad was like, "Of course not!  When you're that age you don't think of things like that."

Bike tires: Sold up.

Twice last year when I got flats, the people at the bike shop convinced me to shell out $25 to get this kind of tire lining that they claimed prevented innertube slippage and would minimize flats.

Since then, I haven’t had a single flat!

They sold me up on to the more expensive product, but it really works.

Pasta sauce cooking!

Recently, tomatoes have been on sale, so I’ve been buying up a lot, cooking down a sauce in my big cast iron skillet (with garlic, jalapenos, onions, maybe some peppers and carrots), and then I throw it in some tupperware and keep it all week, and toss it on freshly-boiled pasta when I need some.

I esp. like adding in jalapenos to the sauce, it gives it kick, but my apartment smells best when I’m boiling down just the tomatoes and I add in the garlic.

Also, the pasta works well as a chilled pasta salad when it's cold out, just take the leftover pasta-with-sauce out of the fridge and eat it directly.

My parents, as they get older.

I love talking with my parents as they get older, and I get older too.

The other week I was talking on the phone with my mom and I was bitching about my dissertation fellowship duties, since not only does the fellowship pay little, but it eats up your time by making you do all these sessions learning how to present your work to a general public.

“But that sounds helpful,” my mom was like.

“It is,” I was like, “But in terms of how that time could be spent, you could be writing up an article, which is relatively more important to get you a job nowadays.  It’s so weird, they expect everyone to get this grand podium from which you can speak to the world, and not only do a lot of their students not get that, but by making people train for that, you’re probably actually increasing the barriers to them getting any sort of worthwhile academic job in the first place.”

“Hmmm,” my mom was like, “Then I wonder why they do that.”

“Because the whole thing is a wet dream of tenured professors from a different generation,” I was like.  “’Look at us, we speak to the world, we train students who speak to the world,’ it’s all an ego and self-image thing, it’s just not lined up with reality, and because of that, they fuck their students over when they think they’re really helping them.”

When I dropped that line about the wet dream, my mom really laughed. 

I like being older, so I can relate to my parents like that.

Resume!

I was touching up my labor activism resume, and under languages I put “basic phrases” for both Polish and Spanish.

As I was finishing that up at the university library, the one Spanish lit prof who I’m friends with and who tolerates my attempts to speak Spanish was there, so I showed him my resume.

“Maybe you should list the phrases,” he was like.

I thought that was funny, but I couldn’t quite figure out if he said that because I know so few Spanish phrases that I could put them on a resume, or because the phrases I know are not the sort of things that are useful in a labor activism context, if you know what I mean.

Art school courtesy.

Somehow, I feel that a lot of profs at the art school aren’t very kind, esp. those who teach critical theory and some studio arts.

My hunch is that they’re nervous and feel like frauds, and take it out by lording it over students.

During the week devoted to criticism of the final projects of masters students, I had to participate in faculty panels giving feedback, and I noticed that some profs just ripped students up, esp. if they were foreign-born from Asia and their English wasn’t the best.

With one student who the panel head felt didn’t know enough relevant artists, he ended up saying that his art was self-absorbed, and he could go so far being a personality, but there were ultimately limits to that. 

Luckily this one photographer guy and me both liked the student's video, and said so.

“I think it will age well,” I said, and I mentioned a similar film that recently played at a film venue, and I said I could see them paired together at a screening decades down the line, to give us windows into everyday life at the time that they were filmed.

With another (Asian) student, whose work was very symbolic about a painful personal history, and many of whose elaborate symbols were incredibly opaque, I took time afterwards to compliment her on several that I found esp. well done, and it turned out that my favorite symbol was hers too.

It meant so much to both those students just to get a compliment on their work, in addition to my constructive criticism. 

I really do think a lot of profs forget that a lot of these people are so young, in their early 20s!  People easily forget what that age is like, and how young you are then.

On another note, on that same day, when I was by a bank of elevators after lunch and one had opened, I called down to a group of people at the other end of the bank, to let them know that a downward elevator had arrived if they wanted to get on.

“Thanks,” one (heavy) (white) (pierced) (leather-wearing) (female) art student said.  “You know, in all my years here, I’ve never had someone ask that.”