These "new bar" proportions are nuts:

The other weekend - actually, the last weekend of my 5th year of newbarhopping - I ended up going to 10 "new" bars, and though I've been thinking about this phenomenon a lot lately, the proportions of what these "new" bars are just floored me:

- only 1 was "new" in the sense of that it was around when I began my project.
- 5 were "flipped" bars where I had been to them before under other names.
- 4 were "new new" bars, in that they had opened since my project began in spaces that hadn't previously been bars.

Some of the "new new" bars and "flipped" bars that I've been hitting lately have been open anywhere from 2 days to a month, sometimes at the outer end like half a year, so I really do think that I'm chasing them down and can win.

It's just a matter of beating the pavement across the city to turn them up, and keeping tabs on what I hear is opening.

More pain, in my pecs.

My backpack's been heavy lately, and though I shouldn't, I sometimes carry it on one shoulder.

Usually, doing that makes my back hurt, but then one day I was a bit panicky, since I noticed that my chest hurt...

It took me a while, but I then realized it wasn't heart pains, but rather pectoral pains, since somehow my pecs (esp. my left one) had gotten strained from holding my backpack like I had been doing.

Realizing that was a relief.

Slight bike accident:

Coming home from the subway stop the other week, I was on my bikeshare bike, and came out from under a railway tunnel to this patch of road with roadwork... 

I wasn't paying attention, and edged off the pavement onto a section of gravel where a fourth of the road had been torn up but not yet paved, which caused my bike to slide out from under me, and I whacked my right shoulder and elbow, and skidded on my elbow and right knee.

My knee stung a bit and so I assumed it was scraped, and then when I got home, I had dinner and whatnot, and then went to go take a shower.

After I pulled off my jeans, I noticed a bit of something hanging off of my knee and picked at it - and it turned out to be a flap of my flesh about the size of a half dollar, rubbed right off my knee.

I yanked it off and didn't feel anything since it had become so separate from my body, and then, before thinking anything, I flicked it, and the thick little perfect bit of my flesh just hung on the side of the sink.

That then grossed me out, so I took it off, and ended up throwing it away in the waste paper basket.

Two days later, I noticed two small holes on the right foresleeve of my coat...  I think the fabric got scraped a bit and tore in two places as I skidded.

Interesting conversation on Beyonce's "Formation".

I forgot to put down this conversation in the week after the Super Bowl, though I've thought back to it a few times -

At the gym, I bumped into the one (older) (black) (male) artist I know, and he told me that he had indeed watched Beyonce's "Formation", and this (younger) (middle-aged) (black) woman who we both know was on a machine nearby and joined in the conversation.

Both agreed that it might just be a stage for Beyonce and a publicity attempt, and they'll be interested to see where she goes after this.

"But what if it is just a phase?", I was like.

"Hey," the woman was like, pleasantly, "You never see real blackness in the media, so you take your blackness where you can find it."

She also said that she saw an interview with Raven Symone where she badmouthed Beyonce doing that, and she said she'd never take Raven Symone seriously again.

"Yes," said the artist, "It's very clear that she's one of those."

In terms of favorite moments, the artist said she'd have to think, and the (mild-mannered!) woman said that she loved how Beyonce sat on the porch in a floppy hat and gave 2 middle fingers to the camera.

Library job perks: Unearthing long-lost books.

With my library job, I've found some misshelved books when shelving, and in a few cases, they were radically misshelved.

The first one was so old, it had no barcodes on it, and the (student) circ worker had no idea what to do with it.

With the second one, it was a "BP" in the "BM"s, and when the same (student) circ worker went to check it in, this notice popped up on screen to send it to a cataloguer, since it had been declared missing.

"YEEEESSSSS!", I was like, doing an air fist-pump, I was so happy.

It's funny how into it I got.

It's almost like I'd lost track of small pleasures like that, what with all the intense work shit in the other areas of my life.

A shocking Surveillance State nanny...

...is my mother!

Since my parents got the internet a few months ago, my mom discovered that there's some webcam perched on some ledge high up on the main library on my campus, showing all the entrances in and out all day as part of some weird connectivity publicity thing associated with my university.

Sometimes she just turns it on, to see what the weather is by me, or to see if she can see me.

The other Friday, she says that she saw me, but I wasn't on campus at all.

Retired people are so funny.

That CBT stuff is great, but disturbing...

So, like a month ago, I got myself a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy workbook for home, to help me fight my periodic anxiety from being shit on in various amounts from school, work, and family.

The other day when I felt so tired, then, I pulled it out on a Sunday evening to do a few exercises and maybe learn a few things to start my week out on the right foot.

After the intro chapter, I saw what seemed most applicable, and automatically flipped to the chapter on living with uncertainty.

Shockingly, when I parsed the dynamics in my life, I found out that not only were 85% of my worries (well-founded) fears rather than (ill-founded) anxieties, but also that a "reality check" of the past few years shows that it's relatively rational to expect worsening circumstances in the future (e.g. suppressed wages, more unstable jobs, higher expenses).

Sigh.

How disturbing.