How dedicated I am vs. Waste: Nauseating squash.

Like over a year ago, back when my one hippie friend from Michigan was doing a lot of volunteer work with this one socialist group, she'd get free bags of half-rotting produce that they'd scavenged from wholesale distributors in the city, and occasionally she'd give some produce to me.

One of those pieces of produce was a squash, oddly okay and not half-rotting.

It sat on top of my fridge for over a year, and though there were a few new blemishes that appeared on it, it never seemed to quite start rotting.

So, when I was on my multi-week cleaning binge the other week, I finally decided to cook the squash up, and halved it, scooped out its (dry) guts, threw some butter on it, and put it in the oven to cook.

By the time it was ready, I was ready for bed, so I let it cool overnight and then threw it in the fridge in the morning.

A few days later, I microwaved it and scraped out the flesh with a grapefruit spoon.

It was very pumpkin-y, and I had to put a lot of salt and pepper on it to disguise the taste.

By the end of it, I could barely get a spoonful down.

The things I do for the environment.

Wonderful interactions with public transportation workers.

The other week I emerged from the main library on campus around 9pm only to find that it was snowing pretty heavily, surprisingly.

I had to wait a relatively long time for a bus, since the one that was supposed to be there got backed up somehow.

When we finally got over to the subway terminal, I told the (black) (male) driver, "Be safe driving out there!", and he was like, "You know what?  Could you knock the ice off my wipers for me?".

So, I stepped off the bus, pulled the wiper on the right as it was moving, and let it slam against the windshield and bang the ice off.

I then motioned to him if he wanted the wiper on the left pulled and the ice banged off it as well.

He nodded with exaggerated motion so I could see him through the windshield, and after I completed that last wiper, he smiled and flashed me a big thumbs-up.

Careers: I shouldn’t bitch.

After New Year’s, I visited my uncle and my mom came and met me there for a few days.

On the train back to the city, I was walking through the aisles back from the dining car when I thought to myself, “How many of the people here really like their jobs?”, as in the nuts-and-bolts of activities that they have to do every day.

Just from looking at everyone, I thought not many, and I realized that I shouldn’t bitch so much about my work right now.

I really do like what I do (the reading, the researching, the teaching), it’s just that the low pay and the instability are draining, not to mention the shitty school environment at the place that I'm doing my degree.

Christmas Eve (2 of 2): Toast.

On Christmas Eve, I really enjoyed the toast of the (Italian) hostess and her (Italian) husband -

“Chin chin!”

- which is a lot of fun when a ton of people say it all at once, esp. with an “-ee-” sound for the “i” of “chin”, though that vowel's at a shorter length than the English “-ee-”.

Oddly, when I was listening to the folk radio show on New Year’s Eve, a singer-songwriter who was performing live over the radio played a new song he wrote involving that toast word, and before playing it he told a story about how his Italian immigrant grandmother used to toast that way.

Christmas Eve (1 of 2): Eyes.

At a Christmas Eve dinner with a lot of Romance languages people, the (Italian) hostess was telling me who was showing up, and mentioned a (Spanish) guy whose name I thought I recognized.

“You know him,” she was like, “He has those blue eyes, very unusual.”

That completely threw me for a loop – I just *never* notice the color of people’s eyes (never have, am not sure why).

Revelation: I know a Basque person.

So one day in the library at my university I ran into the one junior Spanish professor I’m friends with, and I hit him up for the email of another Spaniard who I’ve known through him for years, so I could send him an invite to my 35^th birthday party (= socializing at a bar, going to see a crazy French artfilm, more socializing at a bar).

He was on his laptop, so he pulled up his email right away, copied the guy’s email address (which was his name), and threw it in an email to me.

“What the heck?”, I was like as soon as I saw it, since the guy’s name began with a “Tx-”, which I completely did not expect.

“He spells it the Basque way,” my friend the Spanish professor was like.  “He’s Basque from Navarre, you know.”

“No, I had no idea,” I was like.  “Does he speak Basque?”.

“He spoke Basque as a child, but he says that he’s forgotten it, now,” my friend the Spanish professor was like.

“No shit,” I was like. 

Then, after a pause, I was like, “I bet his parents were building a bomb one day, but it accidentally exploded.  [The Basque guy] was nearby and got a weird brain injury, and *that’s* how he completely forgot his mother language.”

“Could be,” my friend the Spanish professor said, laughing.  “Man, you are awful.”

New Winterizing Endeavor: Wainscotting.

The other weekend, I cleaned my living room thoroughly since I first moved into my current apartment (the first time in 15 months!).

As I was dusting the wainscoting, I noticed it was pulling away a bit in a few places just slightly – but cold air was coming up strongly through those places.

I’ll have to talk with my dad about if there’s anything I can do to close that up, to winterize my place better.