The Way Memory Works is Weird.

The other week on my one Sunday night radio program, I was listening and doing some word puzzles, and like I so often do, I found myself stopped and just listening to the music, which turned out to be a really good recording of Sibelius's 2nd symphony, as the announcer said when it was all over.

(I had arrived late, and I had turned on the music a bit into it, probably a few minutes after the initial announcement of what the piece was.)

That immediately got me thinking of how much I really liked Sibelius's 5th Symphony when I heard it for the first time earlier that year, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't call to mind how the really moving part went.

Then, like just over a week later, I woke up in the morning, and right away as I was waking up, that part of the music was running through my head, unbidden.

A bit later after I had woken up some, then, I tried to remember it again, but I couldn't, but then later in the day I could.

Was Kind of Shocked, by a Student's Life.

It's been interesting to be around the city's community colleges.

One of my students is a really nice (young) (black) guy, who works in his church and whose mom sometimes calls him on the phone.

At one of our recent tutoring sessions, he was super distracted, and he had his phone out on the table and was checking it a lot, and then he excused himself to go take a phone call from his mom.

When he came back, he said that the light bill was due later that day, and they were trying to figure out what to do.

Later, he got a text and he said it was all okay, because a neighbor was helping them cover it.

. . .

Dream of a thing on my face.

The other week, I dreamnt -

I look in the mirror, and I notice that somehow I didn't shave this thing growing out of my face just below the lower righthand corner of my lip, and there's a clump of rather long hairs around and under it.

. . .

Students can be so different, it's funny.

Students can be so different, it's funny.

My mom sent me this article on John Grisham's new thriller, since it's based on for-profit law schools defrauding people.

One student who I tutor got into the article when I set up an exercise around it for him to do, so I decided to use it again the next day, for a different bunch of students.

The first one turned out to *hate* it, and she told me that though she gets into stories and poems, whenever it's something non-fiction, esp. about a person's life, she just tunes out while reading and ends up staring out into space and she really has to force herself to read it, and she often has to read it again a second time, since she didn't engage all that much the first time around.

Then, funnily enough, with the next student that day, she was like, "Thanks so much for this!", and she said she absolutely *hated* the exercise we had done around pop song lyrics, the previous week.

"It just is so much better, when it ties into the real world," she was like.

Like I said, students can be so different, it's funny.

A happening on a trip to the store, the other day.

The other Sunday evening when I was walking to the store, I was walking up the main stretch, and all of a sudden people spill out of a Korean BBQ as I walk by and then some people spill out of the Chinese restaurant a few doors up, and then I notice that they're not customers leaving, but rather people just milling about out front, and I notice that though I can see them, it's because the streetlights across the street are on, but the ones on our side of the street are out, and the storefronts are dark.

"Did the power go out?", I ask a (young) (Chinese) woman who's on her cell and has an apron on and is spilling out onto the sidewalk.

"Yes!", she's like.  "Two or three minutes ago."

As I walk up that block a bit further, I can see the mini-mall to my right is also all dark, and there's a single white emergency light intermittently flashing in the chain pharmacy.

After I did my shopping further up, then, I was walking home, and I noticed the lights in the mini-mall were back on, and so I glanced further up the street and I could see the Chinese restaurant sign all lit up.

The power must have gotten back on, within thirty minutes.

A dream of campaigning.

The other week, I dreamnt:

I have my Yahoo! email account open, and someone's depositing money into my campaign bank account, and as I watch three receipt emails pop up as the most recent emails in my inbox, and I get nervous since they're my first donations and I don't have the state electronic software down yet, to record them, and I start to very mildly worry because I only have so many days to do that, and I'm not sure that when I enter them I'll do it right.

. . .

When I wake up, I'm impressed by how realistic the receipt emails looked, in my dream; they looked exactly like you'd expect email receipts showing up in your Yahoo! account to look like.

A bus trip on a rainy Saturday.

The other Saturday, I took a bus ride to an enrichment class on a rainy morning.

After getting on the bus near my house, we kept going north, since it was a straight shot to where I needed to go, but like a third of the way right before we got there, the bus driver slowed down and gave an announcement over the intercom, that because of a flooded area beneath a viaduct, we would turn off a few streets before, go over a few blocks, go up a few blocks, go over back a few blocks, and then continue our route.

And, we did that.

As we were going to turn back onto our route, a (younger) (white) woman walked up to the driver, and asked if he was going to go left first, to cover some of the sections he missed, that were cut off by our route.

He said "No," and so she got off at the next stop.