New Britishcism:

"First past the post."

It's a phrase used where Americans would say "winner takes all", it seems.

The other week my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair I'm friends with) used that phrase when he was telling me about an interesting article on representative systems that he had read.

British people are ridiculous.

"First past the post."

Insect invasion.

I'm astonished by the amount of insects in my apartment this summer:

- a few earwigs I've seen late at night.

- a couple pillbugs on the walls.

- one night when I got up late to go to the bathroom, a cockroach on the kitchen floor.

- a few ants (including one carrying an egg) scurrying across my kitchen table (these might have gotten into my backpack when I was at the beach, since my backpack was on the chair next to where they appeared on the table).

- a couple carpet beetles I caught on my pillow when I was on the lookout for bedbugs.

- bedbugs (which I can't see, but whose droppings I find).

What's astonishing, too, is that I have diatomaceous earth laid out pretty much everywhere because of the bedbugs, so you think that would kill all of the crawling insects pretty quickly...

Why would they all be in my apartment now?

Factoid on the British high school curriculum...

...that my one (half Sudanese) (half British) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair) went through:

They had a British lit class, but no American lit class!

In my (American) high school, I had both.

Insights into my manipulation of people in unionization conversations.

So, a couple months ago two friends of mine - my one art school colleague who wears women's clothes, and my one library circulation desk supervisor friend - both recommended this self-help book by the head of a nationally-known security company, when we were all out talking and I was saying I needed a self-help book to read in order to complete this reading challenge from my local public library.

As it turns out, I *love* the book, and devoured it in a week once I finally got around to reading it.

The purported topic of the book is about protecting yourself from violence, but it's really more about protecting yourself from manipulation.

What got me is that I already do the first 2 things the author warns against, whenever I cold-call art school colleagues for unionization:

1) I always say "we" to create a group sense between me and the cold-called colleague and so subtly increase rapport.

2) I always give a "bullshit story" on how I'm checking around to see if anyone has touched base with them (though I've done my research and know that no-one has).

Interestingly, I also realized that I *don't* do the 3rd thing the author says to be on the lookout for, the insertion of negative stereotypes into conversation in order to get people to react against them and in the desired behavioral direction.

For example, a truly manipulative organizer would be like, "You know, it'd be great if you had a second to talk, you'd be surprised to know how many people don't want to find out how the school *really* works" (= an incentive for them to not be like those people, and keep up the conversation).

So, I'm going to do that in the future!

Really, I'm just reverse-engineering his cautionary tips on manipulative people, in order to figure out how to be more manipulative.

Acquaintance's prediction on Trump.

A few weeks ago, I was at a fundraising party for a friend's film, and I was talking with a friend of another one of his friends, this (middle-aged) (white) (female) software developer from Michigan.

She says that the one thing about Trump that's constant is his narrative of himself as a winner, so she sees 2 options going forward if he continues to lose, especially if he continues to lose big:

1) He keeps trying to push this "the election is rigged!" conspiracy stuff.

2) He has a breakdown.

The one thing that he won't do, she says, is confront the fact that he's a loser.

Hammock musing.

The other week when I got up on a lazy morning, for some reason I was looking at my feet and toes as I lay stretched out in the hammock in my bedroom.

I got to thinking that feet and toes are like evolved hands, and might have once looked something like the feet of chimpanzees, with flexible grasping fingers, especially the big toe as thumb.

That made me think that to state humans' relationship with apes was super transgressive, back in its day, and trippy.

My dad the other week on Trump:

"That guy's just a f*cking asshole, he's not wrapped tight."

And:

"I can't see any good coming out of him."