Was he serious?!

The other night I said "Good night" to the janitor who was in the hallway at the gym as I walked past, and he responded back "Good night" in what sounded to me like Spanish-accented English.

So, I asked in Spanish if he spoke Spanish, and when he said yes, I told him in Spanish to have a good night, and he said I should have the same.

He then asked me if I was Spanish, because I looked like I was from Spain (!).

I talk with him more, and it turns out that he's Mexican from Jalisco.

Then, later, I kept wondering about him asking if I was Spanish.

Maybe it's my light coloration?  And maybe my introductory comments were so short that I didn't have time to make a grammatical mistake or make up a word, and he didn't have time to hear an accent?

Or maybe he did hear an accent but thought it was an intra-hispanic accent or something like that, or that maybe my parents were from Spain but I was born there?

A guy I know who was born and raised in a suburb of the city has parents from El Salvador and Mexico and grew up speaking Spanish at home, and he says hispanic people tell him all the time that he speaks "white boy Spanish" since it sounds like that.

So odd.

Disturbing comment of a freshman.

I requested a meeting about professional behavior with one of my freshmen writing students at the university I attend.

Overall, I try to be explicit with incoming students about professional expectations (e.g. on deadlines, emails, interactions with professors and TAs and staff), and then if they do something really really whack with me, I ask for a 20 minute meeting to hear their perspective, then share mine, and then talk about how their behavior might be counterproductive for them long-term and lead to a failed class, refusal by a professor for recommendations, or whatever.

Anyhow, this one (shrimpy) (white) (moneyed?) (marginal sport athlete) guy from the East Coast was overly familiar in address in first organizational emails to me, though that stopped after I handed out an email etiquette handout and asked students to follow the suggested protocols.

Then, came requests for exceptions.

First, to honor if possible his practice time (only exemptions I told the students about are final events like performances or athletic events).

Reasonable.  Students have asked that before, and I've tried to honor their requests (though I don't advertise that I do this; I figure if it matters that much, they'll ask).

Second, to switch the 2nd meeting time if possible since his dad was in town for business and wanted to take him out to dinner, and his dad hadn't been able to come in for Parents Weekend.

Kind of reasonable, especially for a first-term freshman.  I'd do the same for anyone, so I let him switch.

Third, after not checking email for a few days over the weekend, I find like 4 emails from him on Monday about how he has to go to this internship interview he just found out about and has talked with tons of people and has gotten people to agree to switch, and then on top of that there's an email from one of those persons confirming the switch.

Very, very whack.

So, I wrote very nicely stating that this seemed like an informal event and not exception-level, and so I asked for a company name and a phone number where I could call to confirm the event.

He wrote back apologetically, and at that point I requested the 20 min. meeting, and asked him to revisit the email professionalism handout, print out all his emails, and mark where he did and did not follow etiquette so we could start having a conversation on that basis.

At the meeting, he was very apologetic and had realized (mostly) how he fucked up, then at one point toward the end he explained that the interview was informal over dinner but the same businessman had given an internship to a friend of his after a meeting like that and so he really really thought it was important to attend.

And then he added, that his parents insisted that if he didn't get an internship soon, they wouldn't buy him spring break tickets to come back home.

He said that, too, as just another fact in his life.

"No shit," I was like, I couldn't help myself, I was so shocked.

Odd parallels between me and my father.

During a bout of correcting, I took a break to have a late lunch and phone my parents while I prepared it.

My dad was asking what I was doing, so I told him that I was grading a lot, with a break to just trim my nails and shave up since I had kind of let myself go for a few days because of my workload.

"Good for you," my dad was like.  "It's important to clean up like that when you're feeling frazzled, I know I do that.  I had a nail day today."

I thought that that was really interesting, that both me and my dad feel a compulsion to stop everything and just neaten up in order to get a handle on a heavy workload.

Also, that doing our nails take time (I know I carefully push back and trim my cuticles, in addition to cutting my nails so they look nice).

Preface to a link sent by my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend.

He forwarded me a link with ten facts about vaginas, introduced by this message:

thought you would appreciate this by the way. ten facts about your gateway into this world

. . .

Scab in my nose.

The other week the edge of my nose hurt, in my left nostril up towards the inside edge.

I looked in the mirror, and beneath a booger crusted in my stubbly nose hairs, there was this small long ugly yellow blister that must have been forming and been getting more and more infected.

So, I took the edge of my nail and popped it, and wiped it off as best I could, and I do believe I must have accidentally peeled away most of the infected skin.

Later, a scab formed, and I had this little brownish red cap right there up in the inside of the edge of my left nostril.

3 great public transportation people:

1) I see the train coming up and so I'm running up the steps and I call out "Hold the train!" as I near the top, and when I arrive, the conductor is leaning out the window, nods at me, and smiles as I walk on the train all out of breath.

2) At that same station, late one night I arrive, and as I'm about to walk out through the turnstiles, the (early 40s) (black) (goateed) man looks up and sees me, and as I say hi, he just smiles and flashes me a peace sign.

3) As I'm on my bikeshare bike down near the university I attend, I'm paused at an intersection, and a van coming from the street to my right makes a lefthand turn and honks and I see the (older) (fatter) (black) (male) driver smile and wave - and I suddenly notice it's the service van for the same bikeshare company, and I realize the guy must have been giving me a shoutout for being a bikeshare member.

Macho Mexicans who fuck guys: Details.

This one anthropologist I know did some fieldwork in the south of Mexico and was telling me about how there's a culture where a macho guy can fuck other guys and it's all good, as long as they're the top.

He said the key thing is that they have to act aggressively towards the other guy and be in charge, e.g., when he would walk past this one construction site near where he lived, guys would yell out, "Hey, you want a piece of this?" or something like that, almost as if they were wanting to beat him up, when really they were wanting something else entirely.

He said another key thing, too, is, the more it's like they get something off the passive guy, the more okay it is.

So, guys try to get $ off of guys who want to suck their dick or take it from them, and it's like they're fucking those guys on multiple levels.

He said that happened quite a bit, where gay guys would pay macho guys in order to suck their dicks.