Union activities weekend (2 of 2): Saturday barbecue.

The next day at the barbecue, I had a fun time sitting out with people in this backyard in a town just north of the city, eating food and drinking beer and just sitting out and chilling.

I saw this one (black) (female) union organizer I hadn’t seen in a long time, and somehow we started talking about Mississippi and Alabama, and she was talking about the time when she was younger she visited her family way down on a farm in Mississippi and she woke up and looked out the window and she saw a big slaughtered hog being drained of blood, and then her family said that they were going to have the best chops and bacon that week.

She also refused to take a bath since there were spiders as big as your palm in the bathtub, but when her aunt made her take the bath, she filled up the sink and splashed around in it, and her aunt walked in and saw her sitting on the toilet doing that, and because of that her aunt said she’d whip her, so she kept sitting on the toilet thinking her aunt couldn’t whip her that way, but her aunt got a switch and went after her legs and thighs.

Also, she and her daughter have visited Alabama, and her daughter picked up the habit of eating red clay river dirt from the area, since people down there add it to snuff when they chew it.

After that, every year until her grandma died, her grandma would send her this big box of red clay river dirt for Christmas, so that she could have it to eat all year long.

“My daughter’s weird like that,” the one (black) (female) union organizer said, and she also said that she had a Fear Factor themed birthday party for her when she was little, and she was upset that the flower pot of dirt and worms wasn’t actually dirt and worms, but crumbled Oreos and gummy worms.

“Give me real worms, Mama!”, she was like, “I’ll eat it!”.

“What did the other kids say?”, I was like.

“Not much,” she was like.  “They were fine with the Oreos and gummy worms.”

She also said that her daughter said that they should have had live cockroaches, too, because she would have eaten them.

At the same barbecue, I also spoke with a (German) colleague from another school, who went to this inflammatory rightwing free speech event on her campus here in the city and was just shocked.

“They called me feminazi because of my short hair,” she was like.

She also said that the U.S. is just horrible and treats low wage workers and women and mothers like shit, and she’s thought of moving back to Germany.

“You know, a British friend who’s thinking of having children has said that,” I was like, "and just a few months ago, too."

“It’s true,” she was like, and we talked a bit more, and she said that this has especially been the case the last ten years, and she’s lived in the U.S. since the mid-90s.