Reconciling myself to a routine.

I was thinking the other day that a lot of getting older is reconciling yourself to your routine.

I keep thinking about the Patricia Arquette character from Boyhood, when she starts crying out of nowhere towards the end of the movie:  "Somehow, I thought there'd be more!", she says.

I ran into a (Turkish) guy from my entering cohort the other week at the main library on campus, and when I told him that I was teaching pretty much full time, he was like, "That is our goal, look, you've achieved your goal, and the dissertation will happen in time."

From one direction, I really like that perspective, to think that I'm settling in to my chosen career.

From the other, I keep thinking of the routine, and how I need to whittle down my goals and my expectations to fit available time.

How sad: Store closure.

I'm kind of sad:

The board games store in my neighborhood closed down.

It was this dumpy shop full of long card tables, and on Friday nights if I was by there, I'd see it chock full of young geeks playing "Magic: The Gathering" and having a good time.

As a store, it really added a lot of life and joy to the street, and I'll miss it.

Great X-mas gifts from my mother: More sweaters.

For Christmas, my parents weren’t going to get me anything, but then my mom came across a great sale on classy v-neck sweaters in dark colors like black, gray, and maroon, where she could get them for like $13.50 each.

(I do wonder how many children had to suffer overseas in order to make those sweaters; our cheap consumer goods are a travesty against humanity.)

I had sent home 2 sweaters to get spots mended, and so you know what she did?

She knew they fit, and so took 1 in to the store to lay out against the sweaters on sale there and make sure sizes were the same, since I wasn’t there to try any on.

She said that a few times the “L”s were sized weird, and she had to sort among them to find one with a consistent fit.

Two apt. problems: Mailbox, mice.

So all at once this winter I had 2 decently major apt. problems at once, to the point where I had to call my landlord:

1) No mail for a week...  I was wondering if it was snow on the sidewalk and had been meaning to call USPS customer service, then I ran into the space-y neighbor from downstairs at the coffee shop on a Sunday and he said he saw the mailman banging on the box and the guy said the main lock wasn't working from the cold.

2) The day after, I'm in my kitchen like 10am by the stove putting on some coffee, and I see a mouse running along the corner of the room.

A Dream of Roaches.

The other night after I noticed that some plaster was cracking a bit in the kitchen, I dreamt -

I wake up and look over to the wainscotting in my room, and it's not wainscotting, but rather molded plaster, and it's cracking a bit with small holes here and there going into the wall, and as I look, 2 very small roaches scurry from sitting out and disappear into those holes.

I think to myself, "I need to call the landlord to let him know about that."

Sore fingers, but not because of the cold.

Whenever I cut my nails, I always cut my nails and my cuticles really really close.

The other day my fingers were aching a bit in my gloves when I was outside in the cold walking, and at first I thought maybe it was much colder out than I thought it would be and my fingers were getting chilled, but then I realized it was actually just my nails and cuticles, combined with a bit of cold.

Kanye West and Paul McCartney.

That same night as the Pepsi Clear story, 2 younger staffers at the bar of a different restaurant were talking about the whole thing where some of Kanye West's fans didn't know who Paul McCartney was.

I spoke with them a bit about that, and was actually defending Kanye's fans, or at least saying why they weren't whack:

- younger people have very channeled media consumption, I've noticed from my university's undergrads, and they often have huge reference gaps b/c they only consume things through certain channels like Netflix recs or streaming recommendations;

- though *our* generation's parents listened to the Beatles, the parents of younger Kanye fans probably haven't, so maybe you'd want to check their references to 80s/90s music; and

- it might be a black thing, where those kids would know references to older African-American artists of that era (e.g. Stevie Wonder), esp. b/c it seems like all the rabid Beatles fans I've ever met have been white (e.g. I've known several white people w/Yellow Submarine film memorabilia, but I don't think I've ever seen the equivalent w/all the black people I've ever met, though you'll hear people gush about when Earth, Wind, and Fire came out, for example, which is right when the Beatles died).