Shocking law school news.

The boyfriend of my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend’s sister, who is also my friend, was talking about his job downtown, which he was very positive about and seemed to like a lot.

Then, later, my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend’s sister said he only worked for billable hours and made $20/hour, no benefits!!!!!!!

She also was reflecting on how older people just don’t really get how bad it is, with the indefinitely bad job situation and no way to pay off all your loans.

Great Italian word: “Qualunquismo”.

Like 3 weekends ago some people I know had a beachfront barbecue, and I ended up talking politics with a young (white) campus liberal who won’t vote since it’s a personal purity thing for him if he ever voted for a party who didn't go far enough politically.

His whole thing was that no party was good enough: he’d say both parties are the same, and then when I’d point out clear differences why Democrats are better, he’d then bring up shit like drones.

An (Italian) grad student friend was there, and he later brought up that that attitude annoys him to no end, since he thinks you have to pick a party and participate in politics.

He also said that Italians call it “qualunquismo”, which translates to “whateverism”, and, as he said, it’s when people make sweeping generalizations and wipe out all political differences between things and think themselves smart for doing it.

He also also said that that happens a lot more in Italy than the U.S., and termed it “a social phenomenon”.

Joke in class: Play on student’s name.

I’m teaching at the art school again.

I always have students try to think through to the right word or phrase to describe what we’re talking about, and towards the end of class, one student whose name begins with “C” and asks everyone to call her “Cee” came up with a stellar word that I jotted on the board.

“Look at that,” I was like, turning around to the class and gesturing to the board.  “Cee had an A+ word!”.

My Spanish pleases people ('el pueblo gusta mi espanol'): Restaurant ('restorante').

The other week on a Monday I was at a Mexican restaurant in my neighborhood after barhopping a bit after teaching up at the art school, and the waitress in there was someone I didn’t know.

As soon as she accidentally slipped in a Spanish phrase when she was taking my order, I switched to Spanish, and she seemed like she was just tolerating me, but let me order anyhow.

“Anything to drink?”, she was like.

“Agua sola” (‘only water’), I was like, “Sin popote” (‘without a straw’), and, as soon as I said that last phrase, she broke out into a quick involuntary smile.

Then, she went to rush around and help other customers.

Five minutes later, she dropped off my water.

“There you go,” she was like.  “Sin popote.”

Addendum.

Before the reception, I pre-gamed at a country bar half a neighborhood over from the gaystrip, and as I was leaving and walking past these 2 (white) dudes and a (dark-haired) (white) sorority-looking girl at a table, one of the muscled-up dudes with his muscled-up arms in short sleeves swings around in his chair, pretends like he has a bow-and-arrow, and shoots an arrow directly into my heart.

“Katniss,” he was like.

“What?”, I was like.

“Katniss,” he was like.  “Katniss Everdeen.”

“Oh,” I was like, non-plussed.

Then, I was like, “Wait, what do you call those other people she faced?”, and the people at the table looked confused.

“You know, like the other gladiators?  There’s a special word for them.”

At that, the dark-haired girl was sucking her drink on a straw and looked at me and just shrugged.

“Tributes!”, I was like, and everyone at the table said something to the effect of “Oh, that’s right.”

“Yeah,” I was like, then, I threw an attitude and stood up to the guy.  “So who the fuck do you think I am, a Tribute?”, and at that they all laughed.

“Perfect comeback, five minutes late,” I was like, and then I walked out.

I really have no idea what the fuck that was all about.

Night out at Gay Clubs.

Several weeks ago I went to a local museum’s honoring of a transgender woman prison activist, then headed up to the reception afterwards and ended up gayclubbing after that.

At the bar after the reception bar, this young Mexican guy with stylish glasses kept eying me from across the room, and when I went to chat him up, it turned out that not only was he working in the city for the summer as a waiter at a fine dining restaurant downtown and was living with family out by the airport, but that 

he also had a boyfriend back in Guadalajara.

I spoke some Spanish with him, too, and he said his name was “Chava”, but I started playing dumb and pretending that it was “Chivo” (‘goat’).

“No,” he was like, “Cha-va.”

“Okay,” I was like, acting like I was trying really intensely to pronounce something very hard,  “Chhhhhh-i-vo,” and as soon as I stopped I looked up and mugged like I was confused and looking for approval and couldn’t understand why I had mispronounced the word again.

He seemed to get a chuckle out of that.

I also met a German stewardess from Lufthansa.

“There are many stereotypes about my profession,” he told me.  “Many are true.”

He also knew Spanish, so we spoke in Spanish a bit.  As it turns out, he likes black men and much prefers the U.S. to Germany for that.

As he explained it, in Germany it’s almost all African immigrants, and a ton of them think you’re rich and so there’s a ton of jealousy and weirdness around class, though he still managed to date two guys long-term, including one from Cameroon.

At the end of the night I ended up at the one trashy late nightclub that I love where all the trans*women go. 

For some reason, they had a theme night where there were 4 acts of trans*people lip-synching to music from "Grease".

During all that, one young clean-shaven “bro”-ey (white) guy off to the side of the stage just kept looking up at them with this almost beatific look on his face, it was so open and pure and happy, and so I talked with him a bit, though he rarely looked at me while we were talking, instead he kept his eyes up on the stage, though most of the trans*women were much older than him (like in their 40s).

He immediately said he was straight, and then as we went on to talk more, it turned out that he was a young vet from Iraq, originally from California, and had a thing for trans*women.

“They’re so beautiful,” he was like.  ‘They’re men, they’re women, what’s not to like?”

He then added that that didn’t mean he hadn’t also slept with men, and after he said that, he looked me in the eye.

It was his first time at the club, and as we were talking up on stage there kept going on this performance of “You’re the One That I Want” with all parts played by trans*women, except for the John Travolta role, which was played by a very young, very cute, very butch lesbian in a leather jacket, with a cigarette behind her ear.

Roomate suspects bedbugs.

A few weeks ago, my roommate came in to the dining room and was like, “Um, I have something I want to talk to you about,” and immediately I started thinking that I had been doing something small and unnoticeable to me but that had nevertheless been driving her unrelentingly crazy and had been building up for months and months and months.

Then, she was like, “I think we may have bedbugs,” and she told me about how several nights earlier she had woken up with a small row of bites on her arm.

It turns out that I had had the same thing happen a few months earlier, one night when I was reading in bed, and all of a sudden this row of bites appeared on my arm and eventually swelled together in one big welt.

So, I told her that since that had happened so much earlier and never repeated and the bites sounded like they were the same kind, maybe it wasn’t bedbugs after all, but instead spiders or something, which would be better.

“I’m really not sure what kind of infestation I prefer,” she was like.

. . .

Eventually, one night when we were both hanging out at the apartment of my one hippie friend from Michigan, we looked online, and the bites looked like flea bites, I thought.