More affirmation from Chinese neighbors:

An old (thickly-built but overall thin) (Chinese) man with a moon face and a short salt-and-pepper beard stopped from hobbling along with a cane and gave me a thumbs-up, when he saw me picking up trash in the local quarry park.

I tried talking with him, but he only spoke some form of Chinese.  He couldn't even say "goodbye", but he responded to everything I said.

I found it very touching, that he so strongly approved of my actions, that he drew on gestures to communicate.

Limits to my environmental neuroticism:

I use the backs of envelopes for my "to do" lists, but I refuse to slit them open and fold them back and then use the unused blank space from the inside of the envelope.

But, I thought about it.

Met the neighborhood alcoholic.

There's a (white) guy on my street who's in his 50s and bald with long dirty reddish-blond hair, who's always walking around soused.

We always say hi, then the other day on a Friday evening around 6pm when I'm getting home from work, we began chatting.

He introduced himself as "Chuck, and I don't give a fuck."

Somehow I mentioned that we'd said hi before, and he was like, "I probably didn't notice since I was drunk."

He also said he works at the flea market, and could get me a very nice bike, any kind I wanted, for $40-50.

He also also said that he has a shoeshine stand that he used to use all up and down the N-S street to the West of my place, back when there was 15 bars on a 5 block stretch, and that he got it out a few days ago and went to shine shoes up outside this bar to the northwest of us, like a 10-15 minute walk away.

"This lady, she gives me sixty dollars, and I tell her, 'Thanks, because I need to buy some shit and get high off that,' and then she starts crying, because that killed her brother, she tells me.  I said, 'Oh no, ma'am, I can't take that, and when I try to give her her money back, the gentleman she's with gives me another twenty!'".

He said he got eighty in all off that shoeshine and he did go get fucked up, but he feels bad.

He also said he was on his third twelve pack of the day, and invited me over to smoke up and drink and party.

"I'm not gay or nothing," he was like, "Let's just go party, man."

My animator colleague's experience with an est group in the late 70s:

He and another guy got roped in to an introductory event accompanying a est graduates seminar by a hot girl that they were both chasing.

In the side event, between the two of them and another new guy who was there for some reason, this woman with a loud brassy New York broad schtick began priming them to sign up for expensive classes by telling them about the est campaign to end world hunger.

But, he started asking questions into the campaign, and when she avoided financial numbers or concrete details, he remarked that it was "strange".

"Strange?!", she was like, getting close to him and hollering in his face.  "That's a concept, asshole!".

. . .

As he then remarked to me, "But what isn't a concept?".

Addendum.

I forgot -

That conversation began b/c her friend had once worked in Sicily doing legal work, and she said it was simply unbelievable how brazen people were, looking you in the eyes and telling you these lies and crying and challenging you if you called them out on anything, when you had very clear documentation in front of you proving that they were lying and you even told them so.

"I hate Sicily," her friend was like.

Distinctions among Arabs.

The other week I was out drinking with the one sister of my (half Sudanese) (half British) friend, and suddenly out of almost nowhere she took the conversation in a new direction and started saying what she really thought about different groups of Arabs.

"It's true what they say about Egyptians," she was like.  "How do you translate it?  'They'd take the eyeliner right off your eyes.'"

She then said that Egyptians had a very brazen hucksterism, and once in Cairo, even, she saw this guy just set up on the sidewalk and demand that tourists pay a fee to pass, and many did.

She said Syrians were awful too.

When she was studying there and her (British) mom visited, she said that everyone would just blatantly check her out.

"Oh, that must have been kind of nice," I was like.  "You know, kind of a 'still got it!' kinda moment."

"No, actually," she was like.  "You know how people say that you can undress someone with your eyes?  That's what they were doing, young soldiers we'd pass by, older men sitting at a restaurant with their wives but just staring over, absolutely everyone."

She said that men in the street would esp. hit on her b/c she looked North African and so assumed that she was a prostitute; in particular, she remembers this car of twenty-somethings pulling up next to her, and one just sticking out his tongue and rolling up its edges to her again and again while he leered at her.

She also said that her and her roommate were the subjects of government surveillance, with clicks on the phone and people hanging outside their apartment for no reason and often following them into the city to see where they went.

"But we could leave that," she was like.  "And they couldn't."

Homemade Sauerkraut!

I've begun making homemade sauerkraut again.

The latest trick, to keep oxygen from reaching any cabbage that floats to the surface of the brine (= a spoilage causer), is to pour an inch of olive oil over the brine-cabbage mixture, since that "seals off" the brine and cabbage underneath.

That seemed to work for a day, but then I woke up one morning and a bunch of cabbage was up in the oil layer...

I think C02 had built up towards the bottom, and a big burp forced cabbage upwards.

At a kitchen goods store, I've begun checking out widemouthed 4 liter jars, since that necksize will allow for insertion of a weight to keep the cabbage pressed down.

I really do love homemade sauerkraut.

At the advice of a Romanian colleague, I cut up corn kernels and dill into the cabbage, and the flavor is astounding.

After I nail down this process, I may even try homemade fermented pickles.