Odd post-5pm sight downtown:

The coat-check girl from that one trashy nightclub, in professional garb and good make-up, walking down the street near that one big department store that she had mentioned to me years ago that she also works at.

She must have just been getting off of work, and she was walking on the streets just like all the other downtown workers on the streets after 5pm on a weekday.

I said "hi," and she smiled and said "hi" back as we passed each other.

Lying in bed post-dissertation.

For like a week after I finished my dissertation, I was just tired.

On the weekends, I noticed that I just kept waking up and lying in bed and then going back to sleep and waking up and lying in bed again, for like an hour or two past when my alarm rang, and I was always knowing that I should get up, but the bed felt so good, so I just stayed in it.

It's not like before I was working through the weekend or anything - I always would take off at least one full day a weekend! - but it was nice to have the time and not have this pressure on in the back of my mind, from a large project, which is what I think allowed me to recognize that possibility for laziness, and take advantage of it.

Linguistic slip-ups...

...said by a person on a video segment in an online training module that I'm required to complete for a new job:

- "enumerous" (for "numerous," but also like "enumerated"?).

- "pacific" (for "specific").

You wonder how that got on there, since no other video had someone making speech mistakes like that.

He only appeared in just that one video, though, whereas a lot of other people were featured across multiple clips.

Odd interaction with a squirrel.

The other week I left my house early afternoon to head into the library for work, and there was a squirrel on the sidewalk.

Instead of scampering up the tree, though, it just sat and actually turned a few steps towards me until it was like two-and-a-half feet from me and facing me.

I wondered right then if it had rabies, but it didn't pursue me as I walked past it.

I'm thinking now that maybe people had been giving it treats or something, and it's young and stupid.

It looked like a young squirrel, too.

Political workshop (2 of 2): VAN.

As I learned at the political workshop, the big voter info file that comes from the government and is supplemented by the political party is called "VAN."

I made a joke about coming off as a sex offender because registering young voters would be "putting kids in the VAN," and then one operative said that one time when he was working for a candidate in the Quad Cities in Iowa, he was having a cigarette outside a diner by the street next to an actual van and there was trouble with the system and from which end you could import/export information to it, so he was yelling in the phone "to put people in one side of the VAN, and if that doesn't work, try the other!", and when he looked up, all the people on the patio were staring at him.

He then said that he said it was an acronym, that he was working for the other campaign than he was actually working for, and went inside, but that ending to the story didn't strike me as true, but as someone too-clever cooking up an ending for an already solid anecdote.

Political workshop (1 of 2): My weak alderman.

The other weekend I went to a weekend-long workshop on the nuts-and-bolts of political campaigns.

We have a machine alderman in my ward, and I ended up catching this (young) (latino) alderman afterwards, who had beaten a long-term incumbent in his part of the city.

He said not only that his sense was that the guy was vulnerable because last time he went to a run-off, but also that someone didn't have to even be from the neighborhood necessarily, since all the studies he's seen show no demonstration that that's a negative, and you can get around the political dynamics with your platform.

From everything that everyone was saying, I almost got a hankering to try to take down the local alderman, to be honest.  I do like a challenge, and the guy's from an old-time political family, so it'd be a blast if I did end up winning.

I almost wonder if I could do it.  I have the Midwest thing down - I'd probably have pictures of me at my hometown festival in the mailing, and me with my great aunt the nun - and I have the labor thing down - I unionized a fucking workplace, for Christ's sake! - and I do know how to put down shoe leather, and it's all about talking to voters.

I also have some ideas for some unifying platforms, and concrete issues to appeal to voters.

I think maybe I'll work with a progressive campaign this time, learn the ropes, and run next time if that guy doesn't win.

It'd certainly be a learning experience!

For now, though, I just want to work on my book ideas.

Bad sign for big labor?

A guy I know from adjunct unionization went on to work for a major national union, and when I saw him the other weekend, he was putting feelers out into finding another job.

He said what with the upcoming SCOTUS right-to-work rulings and the declining percentage of Americans in unions, it just didn't make all that much sense to try and stay in it long-term.

Somehow I get the sense that we're at a low point, though, and things are about to explode in a major way.

People just don't have all that much to lose any more.

For example, just talk to any college kid, and so many of them just see a long horizon of debt and precarious low-paid jobs ahead of them.

To me, at least, they seem like prime unionizing material.