Coffee with a Chilean acquaintance.

The other weekend I had coffee with my one (retired community college professor) (Jewish Hungarian immigrant) (Chilean) acquaintance.

Some highlights:

1) When I brought up how no anti-Semitic stereotypes were really at play in the city's recent mayoral campaign, though they easily could have been since the mayor's Israeli and in the pocket of finance, she was like, "No, anti-Semitism cannot be successful in this country any more, everyone loves money so much!".

She then also added that she could say that because she's Jewish.

2) She remembered a joke her parents told her:

Q:  How do you make a Romanian omelette?

A:  First, go steal two eggs from your Hungarian neighbor...

She then was like, "But you can flip the 2 countries if you want, and I bet that people do that."

3) She said that the night before her dad was to sign the check so that she could go to college for theater, her mom stepped in and said that she didn't want her daughter hanging around with "prostitutes and homosexuals", so her dad didn't sign the check, and she had to wait another year and then go into a medicine-related program.

(Which, incidentally, her mother loved, since she had more chances to marry a doctor.)

Years later, she was in a music ensemble in the U.S., and all her friends were gay.

One time after a European trip in the 70s, she was back in Chile visiting her parents, and her mom was asking her about travelling with her friend the doctor.

"Oh, it was wonderful," my acquaintance told her mom.

"But did you stay in separate rooms?", she was like.

"No, always the same room," my acquaintance told her mom.

Then, her mother took the bait and said "!ay!" or something like that and was deeply scandalized, and then my acquaintance was like, "But mom, he has a boyfriend, don't be silly."

4) She said that the majority of her teachers at her high school in Santiago growing up were communist, and always asked students what they were doing for society.

Two were killed under Pinochet.

Monster nightmare:

A few weeks ago I dreamt -

I was with a group of people in a gallery with taupe walls and marble floors, and there were glass cases here and there, and somehow also artifacts to summon demons, esp. around this one area where astrological signs are embedded in a circle on the floor.

Everyone is nervous, b/c they know a monster is coming.

I walk back towards the entrance and there's a multi-story atrium extending down another 12-14 stories in the building, and suddenly I know that we're high up in a tall building of a museum complex, and as I see this, I also see out of the corner of my eye this big hulking presence that had coalesced out of the floor come sweeping through the gallery.

I nimbly leap down through the atrium, then alight stories below and begin to run off.

I know that the monster cannot follow me that way, but I sense that it's weeping through the galleries floor by floor hunting down people, but most of all it's coming for me.

Next, I'm going down a tight concrete stairwell and exit out into a large underground cave with a ceiling that sores up hundreds of feet above me, and I keep moving, trying to reach a parking garage and the way out.

2 recent theatrical remarks I made at the student bar ~

1) When discussing last names w/someone of Indian origin (in a mock sneering voice):

"This is America, if we can't say your last name, you don't belong here!".

2) When I had told a bartender that the term had finally finished and so I was out partying a lot, and he said it was always nice to "go out and party":

"Go out and party?  Go out and party?  I *AM* the party!".

Bad News - got 3 of 4 art school classes pulled.

Oh man, I just got 2 emails, taking away 3 of my 4 art school classes for next year...

My one World Religions class was *awful* (bad combination of very difficult student group and first-time course design problems w/reading and assignments, was going to revamp a third of them), and I suspect that and a vindictive chairperson dragged me down...

The person who hired me in I thought was nice, but I later learned that he sometimes singles out people to punish.

Because I chose to serve on a committee, that put me in his crosshairs, and he used my fall term's polarized evals to put me on notice.

Then, this term, I got stellar evals for 2 of 3 courses, and mid-to-negative for my nightmare course.

Concurrently, papers to evaluate a departmental curricular sub-section were being collected, w/the very explicit notice that they would *not* be used to penalize anyone.

That particular assignment turned out to bring all sorts of weird religion-related issues out of the woodwork with students, and was compounded by the fact that many students never receive basic training in academic writing...

Though I know that at least one other faculty member was having students re-write papers 3 to 4 times before he felt comfortable turning them in, I took the departmental request at face value, and turned in the papers that I accepted for credit, since I figured that I could always justify myself based on student skill level and first-time course design issues.

So, I think what happened is:

1) the vindictive guy saw the papers and was appalled.

2) that led him to check out some (or all?) of my evals, at which point he decided to mention that b/c of low return rate (i.e. my 1 stellar eval for the freshman writing), he decided to check out another course (the nightmare one), without mentioning the insanely positive sex course evals (if he saw them at all).

3) he emailed the other (or both?) of the people who hired me in for my other courses, to try to get me to lose my job, and the one who hired me in for the nightmare course reviewed the evals and wrote me to drop me (interestingly, he CCed the vindictive guy, so I'm guessing the vindictive guy was the instigator).

I had already mentioned to 2 faculty members (including the guy who hired me in for the nightmare course) that I wanted to meet to get their perspective on some issues w/difficult students this past term, so I think I'm going to:

1) talk to the one who still has me hired for a course.

2) go from there, and perhaps then request a meeting w/the non-vindictive guy (to get his feedback on the student issues).

. . .

Dang, the guy who still has me hired in is going out of town, so I'm not sure what to do now... :/

Snappy dialogue: Trapped under an awning.

The day I finished cleaning out my closet, I then went to go by the bank and then up to the store to do my grocery shopping.

A few blocks away from the bank, the sky opened up and rain just began pouring on down, and so I ran up a bit to stand under an awning sticking out from a house over the sidewalk, and so did a (fat) (low class) (white) woman with a bad complexion.

"You got the right idea!", I said, as I ran under the awning too.

"Good thing I'm not sugar," she was like.

"Huh?", I was like.

"Good thing I'm not sugar," she was like, "Because if I was sugar, I'd melt."

Diet time?

I'm wondering if I should go on a diet.

I've never tried before, but I'm wondering if it'd make me too controlled and neurotic.

I eat healthily and feel very healthy, but it'd be nice to get rid of this small roll of belly fat for summer.

I bet it's only like 5 pounds, honest.

Odd find when cleaning my apt.:

Out of nowhere, I noticed something small and white on the floor just inside the threshold to my bedroom...

A very very small whitened conch-like seashell, the size of an apple seed.