Failed mnemonic notes.

I’ve started keeping ideas for blog posts as draft text messages on my cell phone, and use small words as shorthand to jog my memory later when I actually take the time to sit down and write the posts.

This shorthand has failed a few times, however, and then I have no f*cking idea what I was supposed to write about, for example with:

5-20- centrifuge- ladybug

I also had this shorthand that I can’t interpret:

Get put on bus and go there

. . .

Britney Spears.

I’m underwhelmed by Britney Spear’s new song “Work, Bitch”; it’s a great idea, but the beat and melody and rhythm of the lyrics are much less effective than her “Scream and Shout” collaboration with will.i.am.

On the other hand, my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend is a huge fan of the song, and even says in a very (British) way that it has a good message (“you want a hot body/ you want a Bugatti/ you want a Maserati/ you better work bitch”), and that it should be mandatory viewing at welfare offices everywhere.

(He’s joking, of course, and thinks that poverty is systemic rather than individual, and is instead understatedly poking fun at the reactionary idea that poor people are lazy, through his patently ridiculous idea of the government using a Britney Spears video in an official capacity to motivate the poor...  British humor is so odd, he almost came up with a whole modern-day Monty Python sketch by himself.)

That said, the video for “Work, Bitch” isn’t half bad, especially how a BDSM Britney cracks the whip at the climactic chorus words “now get to work/ bitch”, and how female mannequins explode at a climactic music part towards the video’s end, a striking image that that doesn’t quite make any narrative sense but is nevertheless very memorable and arresting.

Latin tweets.

The other month, I met to read some of Caesar’s Gallic Wars and sightread some of Pope Francis’s Latin tweets with my one very good Latin student, who’s taking time off from regular lessons in order to study for career certification exams.

Many of the Pope’s tweets were profoundly moving, especially the ones about never having war again, and how he extremely deplores the use of chemical weapons.

Who else can send such genuine bursts of truth with such simplicity and authority?

I really didn’t want to stop reading the tweets and our lesson went 20 minutes over, which I justified by saying the extra time was in return for him buying me my beer and whiskey, but even then I wanted to keep reading, and so I stayed at the bar and had another beer and whiskey and kept reading the Pope’s Latin tweets.

Pharmacy lightboard.

Back in October, I was passing by this pharmacy in the neighborhood where the university that I attend is, and the lightboard was programmed to say a number of things in rotation, including –

WE HAVE ALL YOUR HALLOWEEN NEEDS.

“Like ass?”, I thought.

High school religion teacher (2 of 2): The teacher who stayed a while.

That same friend also talked about the 1^st days of the first religion teacher who stayed a while, this (older) (white) liberal post-Vatican II nun who everyone now loves in retrospect but at the time was experienced as an odd mix of repetitious lectures on social justice and unpredictable disciplinary boundaries where she’d spazz out at people who had purposely baited her.

As my friend tells it, in her 1^st days, she spazzed out at someone and said something to the effect of “What are you trying to pull?, who do you think I am?”, to which the (smart ass) (white) (high school) kid sassed back condescendingly, “You’re a religion teacher in a small Catholic high school in [name of town], [name of state].”

At that, she broke out crying.

High school religion teacher (1 of 2): Revolving door days.

My one friend from my hometown who’s like 5 years older than me went to the same (Catholic) high school that I did, but in the famed days of "the revolving religion teacher", where there was a new religion teacher every year for quite a stretch of time, and some of the teachers even got fired mid-year.

One teacher was a guy who was well known in the parish but turned out to be homeless, and for a while hid changes of clothes in the school’s boiler room, and one day adjusted his shoe in class and took out a bar of soap.