Addendum.

I also think sometimes about people who have too much time and not enough to do, and how fortunate I am that I don’t have all the time for all the stuff I want to do.

That’s a blessed way to be.

Better frame of mind.

I’ve been trying to get in a better frame of mind about my Ph.D. program.

Instead of focusing on the negatives, I try to recognize how fortunate I am that I like what I do each day for work, mostly.

The other day after a day of six-and-a-half hours of one-on-one student meetings, instead of dwelling on how tired I was, I thought about how enjoyable that was that I could do that for my job and get paid for it.

When I read books, too, I try not to look at the clock and figure out how many pages I’m finishing per hour, but rather enjoy the book...

When I did that the other day, the time and two chapters from a well-written academic biography just flew by.

Several days later, I was reading a short literary memoir from a Caribbean author for my freshman writing class at several bars while I pregamed for a party later that evening, and when I didn’t focus on how many pages I had read or were left, the next thing I know, I finish the book.

Whenever I work from home on weekdays, too, I read Biblical Hebrew for like 45 minutes to an hour-and-a-half over breakfast, and like three weeks ago that got tedious – until I started thinking, “Look at me, I can sleep in a bit, work in my pajamas, and make my own schedule where I read Hebrew till I poop out over vocabulary, that’s great.”

I need to stop feeling so sorry for myself.

Odd sleeping patterns?.

Like twice over three weeks I recently woke up with a major crink in my neck, where it’d hurt down the back right of my neck into the shoulder.

I’m guessing I slept funny those nights?

After this happened, each time I did some yoga/stretching exercises at home, and everything was better afterward.

Addendum addendum.

The socialist organization my one (hippie) friend from Michigan volunteers with is a mixed bag, it seems.

She met them when they were tabling outside a health foods store near the restaurant where she works, and on the one hand they do good immediate-needs work with un- and underemployed folks in the city’s worst neighborhoods – getting gas reconnected, fighting electricity rate hikes; utilities companies break the law and shut off basic services and want exorbitant “fees” to re-connect though they’re in the wrong and legally can’t do that  – but on the other hand, they’re a moribund organization that really can’t effect political change though they think they can.

I went to a movie/meeting/meal with one of the original organizers in the city, this Jesuit who had been in Guatamala, and talking with the organizers afterwards was intense. 

I was talking the politics of my university with them and how the admin was siphoning off huge amounts of money, and the answer to everything was, “But whose interest does that serve?”, and they kept saying the university didn’t help the poor.

“It does and it doesn’t,” I was like, and added that recent programs that they had started up had helped city kids from public school go on a full ride etc.

“But whose interest does that serve?”, they kept saying.

“You know,”  I was like, “I don’t think everything is some evil conniving scheme.  Hell, I wish it was sometimes, because at least those people are competent and predictable.  I’ve met some of the people who run the place, and they’re fuck-ups.”

That didn’t go over well, and then I added that even if the place was god-awful from the beginning with no social purpose, it was still rhetorically smarter to claim charitable origins and lob out that the people in power had betrayed that beneficent founding vision.

But, like practicing pastors says, you can’t answer a question someone doesn’t have.

My one (hippie) friend from Michigan says that they’re often accused of being a cult, since organizers commit 24-7, live on site, and can’t use drugs or alcohol or have sex.

“And that [name of the one male organizer] is hot,” she was like.  “The other day our hands touched and we just held them there.  But then again, I think, guys spend their early 20s learning how to f*ck, and he’s been in this group since he's 20.  He’s probably awful in bed.”

She also said they’ve learned from the mistakes of past labor groups, and someone’s always at the office near the files.

In fact, she herself has taken night-duty every now and then and up to two times a week has slept overnight on a cot in a room adjoining the office, along with another voulnteer.

Addendum.

I do not think I have ever ordered take-out in my life, and I really don’t get people who do.

If you’re at home, it’s easy and cheaper to cook something simple for yourself.

If you really want to eat out, you can go to someplace nearby and enjoy the atmosphere.

I really just don’t get the appeal.  You make a call, wait a ton of time, and then get a half cold meal served in lots of wasteful plastic?

As a kid, though, I admit that I did enjoy when my parents brought home pizza now and again.

Delivery driver favors.

My one (hippie) friend from Michigan sold her car a few months ago, and now leans on her deliver driver friends to drive her around.

She already relied on them to pick up stuff for her and drop it off at her house – a pack of cigarettes, some hard cider, a grocery she needed – and sometimes if she was out at a bar in the neighborhood she lives and didn’t feel like walking home she’d call them to see if they could squeeze in giving her a quick ride home from the bar, but now she even has them drive her around to different nearby neighborhoods, including the one I live in...

The other night she came over by bus after volunteering at the socialist organization she’s been working at that’s located like twenty blocks directly south of me, and as soon as she arrived, she gave a call to her friend to see when he was getting off work and if he could give her a ride home.

She hung up and was like, “Okay, we've got two hours,” and then we hung out and did a few word puzzles from the new issue of my puzzle magazine.

(We often do word puzzles together; they’re a lot of fun to work through hard ones together, 2 heads really are better than 1.)

Like last month, too, snow was so bad I crashed at her apartment so I could be closer to work the next morning, and she had me run outside and get some groceries from her delivery driver friend, this older eccentric (white) guy was was clean shaven with a shock of bright white hair, in a beat-up old Toyota.  He ran to the store for her between deliveries, and didn't look me in the eye or even in my direction as he handed the small bag of groceries out the window as he was double-parked on the small street outside her apartment building.