Odd dream.

I dreamt that I looked out my window and there was a rooftop there, and I could see people sitting on the eves and around the gable, and I knew that there would be problems with them stealing from me, even though they all seemed to be mild-mannered (white) people in their late teens from the rich suburbs.  

They were sitting there with knees up and arms wrapped around them, looking out to trees their friends were climbing up.

I also dreamt that same night that I looked at an email from this one Classics prof I know, apologizing for being so busy lately and not having a chance to meet up for drinks.

...I think that voices must have drifted up to my room as I slept that night, and that previous day I had been thinking how my term this term is crazy just like that same Classics prof had been telling me his was going to be, back in February...

Good fortune w/gloves.

I’ve tried to get in the habit of buying 2 of something in case I like it and damage it or lose it.

This fall I needed thicker gloves for biking when the temp was in the 30s, so I got 2 pairs of the same black ski gloves when they were on sale at Target.

Like a month ago I had lost a glove (must have fallen out of my pocket), and then like last week the same thing happened.

I had kept the other glove from the other pair, though, and it turns out that I had one left glove and one right glove left over, so I still have a full pair left!

Awful Chinese drivers.

The Chinese(-American?) people in my neighborhood drive awfully.

The other afternoon when I was biking downtown, I was on a side street and this SUV that had been double-parked whipped past me, tapped the brakes at the redlight half a block up, hung a quick right in front of another car, and then did a u-ie right in the middle of the intersection in front of a car heading cross-ways.

The driver had been this (middle-aged) (Chinese) guy whose eyes hadn’t looked right when I passed him on my bike as he was double-parked.

He looked angry, for some reason.

What a lovely Easter Sunday.

My Easter Sunday:

- reading excerpts from Marx’s Capital, as prep for the freshman writing course.

- seeing 1.5 hours of interviews with Donald Rumsfeld (=Errol Morris’s new documentary “The Unknown Known”), as the focal point of an evening out with a few friends.

Marx and Donald Rumsfeld, my Easter Sunday.

“Wolf of Wall Street” on straight manhood.

From Jordan Belfort’s “Catching the Wolf of Wall Street”, pp. 259-260, after his private investigator tapes his separated wife saying that she’s only said she’s open to reconciliation in order to milk Belfort of a house and once she gets that she’ll divorce him:

In a dead-serious tone, [my PI] said, “Listen to me..., because I’m not gonna bullshit you.  What’s happened to you over the last six months should happen to no man.  There’s no sugarcoating it.  It sucks.  It all sucks.”  He shook his head slowly.  “But you gotta take a deep breath now and pick up the pieces.  It’s time to be a man.  You understand...?  To be a man?”

I nodded.  “Yeah,” I said softly.  “I do.”

He squeezed my arm tighter now.  “No woman can get the best of you..., no wife, no girlfriend, no mistress, no one.  Except one.  You know who that is...?”

I nodded slowly, fighting back tears now.  “[My daughter] Chandler,” I said softly.

“That’s right...:  Chandler.  She’s the only one who counts now; the rest of them will come and go out of your life.  And you owe it to her to stiffen your upper lip and hold your head high, and you owe it to that little son of yours too....  [H]e’s gonna keep growing; then he’s gonna look to you one day to show him what it means to be a man and to show him that no matter how much shit comes his way, in the end, he can always come out on top.”

Essentially, from the way I understand this, the husband can f*ck the stay-at-home wife as much as he wants and come away self-righteous, since it becomes a pissing match of money and power (all on his side!) in order to maintain power over a woman with even less money and power, and eventually status in her eyes - because he fought for her? because that's what happens when you win, people who you didn't f*ck should admire you?.

Also, the only people he can be vulnerable with are his daughter (not his son so much), and another father who opens up to him.

Another interesting “Wolf of Wall Street” sexual dynamic.

From Jordan Belfort’s “Catching the Wolf of Wall Street”, pp. 184-185 – in which scene (set up in the memoir as told to the U.S. Attorneys’ Office when he agreed to cooperate and entrap associates), he reminisces back to how after he showed an acquaintance how to do stock sales afterhours and the guy’s girlfriend was in the room, they were driving back all together across Long Island so they could drop Belfort off at the apartment he shared with his (first) wife –

We were in Kenny’s red Mustang:  He was behind the wheel, I was in the passenger seat, and [the pouty-lipped girl who I nicknamed] the Goldfish was sitting between us, on the armrest, wearing a tiny midriff T-shirt and some wildly sexy perfume.  We were on the Cross Island Parkway near the exit for Bayside, when Kenny said to her: “Go ahead sweetie, tell him!”

“No’” she whined, “I’m too embarrassed, Kenny!”

So Kenny said, “Fine, I’ll tell him, then,” and he looked at me and said, “She got really turned on watching you sell tonight, so she’d like to blow you.  And trust me:  The girl can suck chrome off a trailer hitch!  Just look at her mouth.  Pucker up for him, sweetie.”

I looked at the Goldfish, astonished, as she stared back at me with her fabulous goldfish lips puckered up into a sensuous pout.  Then she started nodding her head bashfully, as if to say, “I’d like to blow you, sir!”...

Well, needless to say, the Goldfish overpowered me, and next thing I knew she was giving a world-class blow job as we cruised down the Cross Island Parkway.

And as I groaned in ecstasy, Kenny the Pervert kept one eye on the road and one hand on the steering wheel, and his other eye on the Goldfish’s mouth and his other hand holding back her brown hair, so it wouldn’t disturb his view...  I shot my load, if I recall correctly, right in front of P.S. One Sixty-nine, where I’d attended public school.

The dynamics in this scene are *fascinating*:

- At its most basic, the voyeurism of a “live porn” scene, where the angles aren’t right and the viewer intervenes to ensure a good sightline.

- Male bonding through proximity during sex acts.

- Male-to-male deferment in which one guy acknowledges another’s (sales) prowess by lending him his girlfriend, and the other guy demonstrates his (overall, including sexual) prowess by using the girlfriend in front of her boyfriend.

It’s easy to see how this could devolve into the situations like in the first memoir, where it’s okay for one broker to make another suck him off, since it’s not gay, it’s just a demonstration of power.

Great idea: Latin reading group.

As soon as I finish my Ph.D., I’m going to try to gather a Latin sightreading group that meets once or twice a month, likely using a book that has vocab/grammar notes opposite the page of Latin, so as many people can join as possible.

I’d advertise among students and professors at local universities, and high school Latin teachers as well, and maybe I'll throw up a few random signs or put a few notices in local media.

I think such a reading group would be a *blast*, esp. since I have so much fun as it is tutoring my Latin and Greek students, and since there’s so many Latin texts that I look at or briefly read (tweets by Pope Francis, writings of Francis of Assisi) that would be easy and fun to read more at length.

It’s too bad that I won’t have any time for this until I graduate, I think it would be invigorating and rewarding.