Sprawled rubber band.

The other week a rubber band was sprawled on my kitchen table for some reason, and as I re-approach the table, I notice that it's like a fat U with a wider arc and more enlarged tips, with one tip even a bit bigger than another.

And, I immediately notice it's pretty much a "spot on" approximation of one of those buttplugs for women, where the one end goes in your butt and the other around into your hoo-haw.

Though, now that I think of it, though I've seen them sold, I've never seen them in use, so I have no idea which place the slightly bigger tip goes.

Neighborhood sight at 10am:

The (older) (white bearded) garage owner who hangs out by his open garage doored car repair shop near me with his unleashed, quiet, kind German shepherd, is sitting out on a nearby stoop at like 10 am talking with a friend, and already drinking from a (Miller Lite) beer bottle.

Wart update.

So, the skin over my wart got all pulled up at the edges from the wart remover and soaking and keeping duct tape over it, so I finally just pulled it off one day, since the skin was dead anyways.

I then used nail clippers to trim the dead skin back to the edges.

Since then, there's this whitish center part, and though I apply wart remover to it every day, it doesn't seem to be doing much of anything.

For a while it got yellow and hard, and so I used the nail clippers to carefully trim that part off.

But, the white part there is just there now, and the overall wart doesn't seem to be reducing in size.

Supposedly the process takes up to 12 weeks, and I'm wondering what the next big change in everything will be.

A new sight, a Spanish jug.

The other weekend my one (white) friend from Mississippi and my one (Spanish) professor friend had a barbecue, and my one (Spanish) professor friend had a sizeable ceramic jug with him that he had brought back from Spain.

It had a handle over the top, a little spout on one side, and a bigger mouth on the other, so you could hold it by the handle and tip and the water would come out the little spout without sputtering, since the bigger mouth where you could fill it would let the air in.

I'm also wondering if the ceramics kept the water cooler, somehow.

The whole make-up of the jug seemed very thought out and sensible.

New development in higher ed:

When students admit to any form of minor mental illness (e.g. depression), administrators try to get them to leave their programs *immediately*, out of shortsighted concern for liability.

This was happening at the art school, and a colleague from a big-name university in the South said the same thing's happening there.

Only, that makes students hesitant to report *anything*, and so mental illness escalates out of control and leads to worse outcomes.

A reflection of a resident Irishman.

The other day at a (new) bar, a re-opened seafood place downtown, the (young) (white) bartender turned out to be Irish.

"So you're here for the summer?", I was like, referencing the many (young) (Irish) workers who come to the city to work every year.

"No," he was like, "I've actually lived here two years."

He then said that he can pick out the Irish people here working for the summer.

"How?", I was like.

"Because I can see my own kind," he was like.

"No, I mean like, what makes them seem Irish to you?", I was like.

"Because they travel in groups and they tend to dress a little more colorfully than Americans," he was like.

New neighbor upstairs.

So, I got a new neighbor upstairs, after the family moved out.

When they were moving in, I could hear heavy steps on the stairs, and they had their car parked outside with the doors open and music blaring, not a good sign.

For like the first day, I couldn't figure out why their steps were so heavy and clunky; at one point, I couldn't even do work at my table, the noise was so thumpy and erratic and bad.

So, I finally went up there to talk to the neighbor nicely, and she's like a (5'4") (mid-20s) (black) girl with a big 'Fro, and she had these gigantic platform shoes with hard soles sitting outside her door, which made me guess that for some reason she had been wearing them inside and walking around the apartment (?!).

I was very nice and said that though she didn't realize it because she's on the top floor, floors are thin and I've had to learn to walk softly etc. and even then I've woken up the people below me, and to wear soft shoes and to try to walk quietly, and to just stomp if she ever wants me to turn down my radio, since I play it sometimes at night and I don't want to bother her.

"Okay," she was like, very pleasantly.  "Thanks for letting me know, I'm a heavy walker."

Since then, she's been doing better, but she still walks a heck of a lot heavier than my old, adult neighbors, and she *slams* the front door sometimes.

I wonder what her upbringing was like, and where she gets her money.

My hunch is that her parents support her to some extent, and she's a bit spoiled, though a nice person inside.