Advice from a liberal arts professor who got a job in 2010:

“Trust your instincts and get the fuck out.”

He teaches at a pretty well-known top tier liberal arts college, and he said that it’s a bunch of rich kids and the older professors are so out-of-touch that it’s like “Nero fiddling while Rome burns.”

Also, though I’ve never gotten that from him, some kids put on his evaluations, that the words he uses “are too big”.

And, his department chair called him on the carpet for that!

A few weeks before that, I met at an art opening an MFA on a tenure-track job at a smaller Catholic school in the city, and she said that there and one other place she knows of in the city, the admin are going after tenured profs’ salaries, saying that it’s necessary to save the school, money is so bad.

“I’m honestly thinking of leaving,” she was like.  “I made more money as a home healthcare aide, and the job is just getting awful.”

I told these stories to my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend, and he just grimaced.

“And those are supposedly the good jobs,” he was like.

Honestly, this is the year that higher ed has completely gone down the tubes, even 2 profs at the school where I’m finishing my degree have said they wish they could leave, the finances are so stressful, and that’s someone with tenure and another guy who’s going up for tenure.

Plus, I know of at least 8 or 9 state schools in the news in the past few months, where they’ve busted tenure lines or merged departments or called off searches or tried to gut tenure.

I think this is a sign of worse to come, and tenured profs are sitting ducks almost everywhere and are the next big target.

They have very low job mobility, tend to be p*ssies who try not to rock the boat, and not only would most people around think they’re overpaid, but they also wouldn’t lift a finger to help them, since they tend to be self-absorbed and to not go out of their way to help anyone else.

Pattern-wise, they remind me of public workers in Wisconsin when Scott Walker busted them by saying “why should you fund people who make more money than you?”.

Odd concert people at the free summer concerts downtown:

1)      A(n older) (black) (bearded) (capped) (homeless?) man in a torn dirty black sweatshirt and torn dirty grey sweatpants, who twice now during a concert has walked from right to left across the main aisle, with a chain of keys attached to his left leg making a metallic jingle sound with every step.

2)      A (young) (Chinese?) guy who comes in during the second half, pulls out a laptop, stares at it thoughtfully and types every once in a while, and leaves just before the end of the concert.

3)      This (young) (chubby faced) (hispanic) two year old boy, who inhales sometimes like he’s snoring, but otherwise just sits in his seat like a miniature sack of potatoes and stares straight ahead kind of out of it, while his mom and one other person sit to his left.

Bed bugs are back, a 3rd time.

So, I got a bite in the middle of my back on a Monday, but I didn’t think it was a bedbug bite since it was just one and it emerged very very late in the afternoon, but then on Thursday when I went to go meet my neighbor to get the key to take care of her and her husband’s cat, she tells me that that week she got a bite too, and she looked around and found a body and put it in a Ziploc bag and then got an inspector out, who said he couldn’t find anything and that the body she found didn’t count so he could start treatment since he didn’t find it, but if it was true, it was a very low level infestation that was just beginning.

And, as we talk, I feel another bite beginning to emerge on my leg.

So, I go home, check the sheets, find a dropping, am like, “Son of a bitch!”, and then I gather all of my bedding to head to the laundromat before last load.

While I’m there, I bump into one of the (Mexican) ladies I know, who humors me by letting me speak Spanish with her.

“!La chinchas volvieron!”, I was like (“The bedbugs returned!”), as soon as I walked in.

At that point, she said something like “?Verdad?” (“Really?”), and we went on to talk about our plans for the Fourth of July (she was going to St. Louis to hang out with a friend there).

And, she also reminded me that the laundromat closes at ten, and that her husband who’s a trucker has been gone for eight days straight, so she really needs to get home on time.

Later, she was asking me about my family, and I told her my dad was an immigrant after the Second World War, and she corrected me on where I put the word “Second” in Spanish.

Later later, I said bye because I was going home to take care of stuff before coming back to get my stuff out of the drier, and I tried to make a joke that I was returning to fight in the Second House War, and she helped me with the adjective (“la segunda Guerra domiciliaria”), then laughed and was like, “!Contra las chinchas!” (“against the bedbugs!”).

Overheard story between 5 kind of trashy office employees at the (new) downtown rooftop bar of a cheap but still overpriced major chain motel.

Of the 5, all (white), there’s 2 women, and as I sit and read, one’s like to the other, but apparently trying to start a conversation with all of them, “So, Tom has a huge penis.”

But, the other woman doesn’t take that thread up, and the comment kind of just hangs there and then they just move on with their conversation like the comment never happened in the first place.

Later, the entire group is talking, and the 3 starting-to-get-fattish bro dudes are talking about the time their friend patronized a prostitute, but I couldn’t hear everything, but the end of the story was that somehow there was “cum everywhere” and the prostitute was like, “You have to leave now.”

At that, everyone laughed.

People in my neighborhood:

1)  The other week when I was out walking around on a warm summer’s day to go do some errands, there were a ton of (very skinny) (cracked out) (white) people hanging out in the doorways of the buildings here and there that look very low rent, and I got the hunch that they were all junkies.

2)  At the Dollar Store, the (younger) (hispanic) (male) cashier had this crazy hairdye job, where his hair was a very red shade of reddish-orange, but edged off more towards orange and even bleached out yellow towards the edges, and I couldn’t help but look at it, it looked so fresh and stylish and cool.

“I got to say,” I was like, “Your hair looks very hip.”

“Thanks,” he was like, “But I’m actually dying it back to black.”

“No way!”, I was like.  “Why?”

“I dyed it get it out of my system,” he was like, “But now my girlfriend’s parents said I can’t see their daughter unless I change it.”

“Weird,” I was like.  “Are they evangelical?”

“No,” he was like, “Catholic.  But they see themselves as a model family for everyone that they know.”

“Weird,” I was like.  “You should dye part of your hair white and another part blue, and then when they get on you, you should say, ‘You guys are being anti-American, you should set a better example for the neighbors, stop being so anti-American.’”

At that, he laughed.

“Maybe,” he was like.

3)  The other week when I was coming home from the beach, I was walking across the street of the main business strip, and this (40-something) (skinny) (white) guy in a ball cap rides across the street in the opposite direction, and then passes me and I heard a noise, and when I turn around I not only see that he missed the handicap ramp up onto the sidewalk and hit the curb instead and fell over, but that he also has a beer bottle in his hand that he’s somehow managed to keep upright and not let fall and shatter on the sidewalk or at least tip over and spill out all his beer.

“You all right, man?”, I called out from the other side of the street, where I had now gotten to.

“Yeah,” he called back.

Then, he noticed what had happened and suddenly became embarrassed.

“I planned that, man, I planned that!”, he called out to me.

 

4)  The other week in the middle of the day on a Saturday as I was coming home from the grocery store laden down with groceries, I’m waiting at the corner of a major intersection for the light to change so I can walk home, and I hear from nowhere the sound of the song “Masquerade” from “Phantom of the Opera’ coming from somewhere, and this (older) (skinny) (white) guy standing next to me in a thin blue wifebeater that hangs down just straight down off his frame seems to notice it too, and we both look around and both notice around the same time that it’s coming from a car on the opposite side of the street.

Then, as the light changes, we start crossing the street, and as the car starts to pass us, we not only hear that the people in the car are singing along to the song playing off of the car stereo, but look in, and it’s four young guys, all of different races, one (white) guy one (black) guy one (hispanic) guy and one (Asian) guy, and I give a weird look and the (young) (black) guy who’s in the passenger seat with his elbow hanging out the window as he sings gives a look at me and starts laughing because he sees that I see.

Then, they’re gone.

“That’s different,” I at that point say to the (older) (white) (skinny) guy standing next to me.

“Yeah,” he’s like, truthfully, and as he says that, I suddenly notice that he has barely any teeth.

Bike problems: Back tire.

So, lately when I’ve been riding my bike, I’ve noticed that it’s gone slower and occasionally there’s been some regular metal rubbing sound that goes in time with my pedaling, but I figured that that was just maybe a lack of oil on the chain, and the bike falling apart, and my being tired or maybe my getting used to the light bikeshare bikes and suddenly finding my old Schwinn heavy.

The other Sunday, though, I biked up to this lakefront café before heading out for a beachday, and after I got my bike off the rack, it was like the brake was always on, and so for like ten to fifteen minutes I was stop and go on the path, trying to figure out if the brakes were whack or my back metal mudguard was rubbing the tire or what.

Eventually, I figured out that the back tire was loose and would wobble heavily, and when I began riding, it’d kick majorly to the left, and start rubbing at its edge against the frame.

So, I checked out a bikeshare bike, rode it down to the turnoff towards my house and locked it up there, went on to have my beach day, and later picked it up and walked it home.

I’m guessing now that the tire must have been like this for a while, and somehow my locking it up at the lakefront café must have forced the frame over or jarred the tire loose, to where it got to the point where I couldn’t ride it if I sat on it.

Interesting City Park I Went to for the First Time.

So, the other weekend my one library circulation desk supervisor friend who I’ve been hanging out with a lot invited me to this musicfest up near the city’s Chinatown, and it happened to be held in this riverfront park that I’ve seen from the subway when it goes elevated and also the bikelane of one major street that goes arching over it.

To me, the park has never looked like much apart from a pagoda-like pavilion, just strips of field along the river with a few paths here.

But, once you got into it, it was *awesome*.

There was a ton of vegetation like willows and prairie grasses that you couldn’t really see from far away.

Plus, the viewpoint across the river was of all these rusty towering industrial structures, like old warehouses and bridges and even bridges that raise up and down to let ships pass underneath.

So, you’d stroll along the river amidst this very nicely landscaped park, and look across to a decaying industrial landscape, and occasionally over trees towards downtown and see all the skyscrapers raising up.

I found that juxtaposition very cool.

Since it’s near Chinatown, too, all the benches looked something like Oriental divans.