Song of a child and father at the supermarket:

The other Sunday at the supermarket in my neighborhood, this (Latino) dad and his little toddler were pushing up the shopping cart together into the rack just at the same time that I was going to get one out, and they were singing together "Raaaaa-men nooodles, raaaaaaa-men nooodles," in their own little song together about ramen noodles.

Bedbug neuroticism, redux:

One evening I kept waking up in the middle of the night because my skin was dry and a bit itchy...

And when I'd be half-awake and go to scratch a spot, all of a sudden my heart would leap out of my chest b/c I'd think for a second that I had gotten a new bedbug bite, in my new apartment, and that the horror had returned, just when I thought I was finally safe again and back to normal.

A dream of Rimsky-Korsakov:

The other week I dreamt -

I was in a non-descript office-like modern college building, and this little old plump Russian woman who was very demure in appearance and behavior and had an inward-turned body posture and a score clutched to her chest but a glowing face was there with me, and as she began walking ahead I followed her through the building.

She was Rimsky-Korsakov and working as a composition instructor at the university, and I was going to be honored with an early hearing of a commissioned work she was working on.

. . .

Class comments that I should check...

...when discussing writing with my freshpersons:

1) Regarding an example of extreme violence against women in a Roman text that we read, I was like, "That treatment of women is so extreme, even Donald Trump couldn't conceive of it."

(At that, one freshperson added, "Or rather, even Donald Trump would be shocked!").

2) When they were super tired and couldn't focus on papers, I was like, "What the heck, people, isn't this why you take Adderall?  What the piss happened, did someone sell you some bum Adderall?".

(With that comment, I actually restrained myself from putting on a parodic little kid voice and saying, "Gee, we got f*cked twice, first with the money, and then with all the work we couldn't do!  Man, that third year dealer kid really f*cked us hard!")

Odds and ends (2): Sheet.

The other week I woke up to find that I had kicked part of my sheet off my bed, and it draped off my bed onto my floor.

At seeing that, I was horrified, since I thought at once that any bedbugs in the apartment could have crawled up the sheet and onto my bed while I slept.

Thankfully, no bites emerged as I ate breakfast, and I realized that I was indeed overreacting, I think.

It's hard to shake the feeling of your apartment being unclean, I've lived with it for so long.

Odds and ends (1): Shit.

The other week I was shelving books in the library, and I was shelving by a shelf right outside the bathroom when some guy walks by me, goes into the bathroom, and then I can not only hear a noisy shit, but also the sounds of him rolling out and tearing off toilet paper and then pausing to wipe his ass after he's all done taking his noisy shit.

As he does that, I think to myself that perverts would find that part of my job pleasurable, and I wonder if some people take jobs like mine just so they can listen sometimes to other people shitting.

A dream of my new apartment:

The other week I dreamt -

I'm planning to get some paper to put up on odd high windows in my apartment to keep people looking in from the back porch or to block views into the top part of a closet from my foyer, but I get out my lease and I look, and there's clause after clause about what patterns I can use if I choose to buy paper like that, since I'll more than likely leave it in the apartment after I move out and then the person who comes after me will have to deal with it and live with it.

. . .

(In real life I actually have these windows, and I've been meaning to buy some paper and some glue dots and slap some up to cover up the windows.)