Background of my one Brazilian student.

The other day I popped by the one professor I work for’s office hours to take 20 minutes and go over some stuff with him, but I had to wait since like 4 students showed up to talk about their upcoming papers with him.

2 students were on one bench in the hallway outside his office, and then the 1 Brazilian student in my section was on the other, so I sat down by him.

I chit-chatted a bit and asked him about what high school he went to, World Youth Day, how he ended up at this university, and then I asked him what his parents did for a living.

“My father is in exports,” he was like.

“You mean like arms?”, I was like.

“No, not really, general exports,” he was like.  “But he did export tanks during the Nineties.”

“No shit,” I was like.  “Where?”.

“Cuba, and the Middle East.”

“No shit,” I was like.  “Like what countries?”

“Iraq I know for certain,” he was like.

“Now that’s an equal opportunity exporter,” I was like.  “Dictatorial governments on both the right and the left.”

I didn't ask him if he morally approved of what his dad did, but I do wonder.

Another fortunate pairing: Bikelights.

I had lost my front bikelight, and had to buy a new set.

Then, I lost another bikelight, the back bikelight from the new set.

So, I luckily still had a complete set:  the back bikelight from the old set, and the front bikelight from the new set.

It's exactly like what happened with my gloves!

Charlie Chaplin vs. Buster Keaton.

I just don't get the appeal of Charlie Chaplin.

His antics are so clown-ish, that the character is almost repellent.

Buster Keaton is so much better, I think.  There's slapstick comedy, but somehow he comes off as human rather than non-human.

Drugstore conversation.

A local drugstore chain has tried to class itself up and expand into foodstuffs, including portable consumables, some of which are on the level of gas station sandwiches.

Like a month ago two townie women were behind me in the checkout line at the pharmacy in my neighborhood, this kind of know-it-all (middle-aged) (white) woman of the type to have an attitude about everything, and this kind of shrivelled up old (white) woman with a slight gray beehive who was old enough to be the first woman's mother.

“Look at that pineapple,” the middle-aged woman was like, pointing to a plastic box of cut-up pineapple in a small cooler of ready-to-eat foodstuffs by the counter leading up to the register.  “You could get two whole pineapples over at [grocery store across the street] for what you’d pay for that.”

Then, after a pause, she was like, “And I don’t trust that sushi either.”

Another dream of decay.

A few weeks ago, I dreamt that I opened my refrigerator, and I had tucked a longer-shaped stuffed sandwich into the upper rack on the door, and the insides had fallen down onto the rack below, and stuff had dripped out too, coating the door in food juice that was rotting and turning black with mold.

The sandwich was broken apart in the middle, with stuff falling out from each end, like its center had fallen through the bread on the bottom.

I looked more closely at the sandwich and saw that it had been wrapped in a shiny paper like they wrap Arby's sandwiches in, but the juice had soaked through that and caused the sandwich to fall apart and spill down the rack.

Some of the stuffing on the bottom rack looked almost like an hardboiled egg broken apart with the hardened yolk crumbling out all over.

Talked with my one (black) friend who used to man the library security desk.

I gave her a buzz to let her know that our mutual friend had died.

After we talked about her a bit, she asked me how I had been doing, and then I asked her how she was, adding like I often do, "Good, bad, or ugly?".

"Definitely not that last one," she was like.

Addendum.

I remember, when I was a kid, my maternal grandma took a high school class photo and just went row-by-row through the people and was like, “Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead...”

Sometimes, too, she used to sit and watch the local cable channel that was nothing but rotating obituary announcements.

“The old ladies’ sportspage,” she used to call it.