2 observations about smells:

1) My one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the sister of the pair), upon entering a 7-11, as an aside almost to herself:

"All 7-11s smell the same."

2) My library supervisor, upon returning from his vacation in New Orleans:

"Bourbon Street smelled exactly like I expected."

Three art school student reactions to sex class material:

1) One of my students said that she loved the book about sacred prostitution, "since I love everything about the Seventies."

2) Another student said that the bestiality unit was his favorite, since it challenged him on a lot of levels, with new knowledge and with what he had previously thought about the subject.  The way he talked about the unit, it seemed like a very memorable college moment for him.

3) Yet another student said that she's started reading nun memoirs, since the class got her starting liking them so much.

. . .

I told the students that if they ever wanted books recs or if I could be a resource to them with their practices, to look me up, and I'd be glad to help them if I could.

"It's really fun for me to see what you're interested in and what comes out in your work," I was like.  "Working with artists is a total perk of the job, I love it."

"You mean we can email you after the term ends?", one was like.

"Totally," I was like.

Confronting poverty in the city.

The one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend of mine, the sister of the brother - sister pair I'm friends with, has been making a few trips in the city as part of her legal gig temping for the local government.

"It's pretty bad out there," she was like, and she described a house where it was nothing but syringes and toys, because children lived there with druggies.

She also told me about another house, where there was a couch, and otherwise everything was on the floor, because people didn't have furniture.

"It's not like they didn't try to keep everything neat," she was like, "It's just that they owned nothing to put things in, so there was clothes folded up all over, it's like everything they owned was just spread out on the floor."

It was also at that house or maybe another one where there were a lot of roaches she saw.

"And that was during the daytime," she was like.  "Imagine what it's like at night."

She said that that house made her want to take a shower as soon as she got home, and she wasn't even thinking of her maybe getting bedbugs until her brother brought up that possibility.

Addendum.

After I wrote that last post, I was in the school library, and I realized that the (Chinese) woman who is the guard at the front desk sometimes wears a red sweater over pink, too.

It definitely must be a color combination from a different culture.

A park sight: (Older) (Chinese) women in pink and red.

Here and there there are (older) (Chinese) women at the quarry park.

Often, they wear bright pink shirts, with red sweaters or cardigans or whatever on top of it.

That combination of colors is very unusual here, but my hunch is is that it's not, for them.

Late night sight: A kite.

The other week, I was biking home on the main street past the quarry park relatively late at night, and it was windy out.

I saw something high above me, and I looked up, and it was a kite that had its string caught in the electrical wires, but was otherwise flying high above the road, way high up.

The street was pretty desolate at that time of night, too.

An art school student's register lapses...

...in the last bit of this assignment, where they have to stake out a research project and identify a feasible means of answering their own question:

For this research, I’d want to look up the history of cults and how one person can influence hundreds of people to do some wild shit. 

. . .