A surprising post-bed bug possibility.

Like a few months ago, I finally dug all my stuff out of storage and set everything up post-bed bug, since it had been over a year since like everything had been boxed up and so any adults would have died and even any eggs would have hatched and died by then.

Then, one day I was home late on a very cold night, and it was too quiet, but I didn't feel like the Top 40 or classical stations or my Fleetwood Mac albums or any Beach Boys or Madonna.

"I feel like something mellow," I kept thinking to myself.

And then, I remembered that I had dug all my old CDs out, so I rifled through them and found Carole King's Tapestry and threw that shit on.

It was late at night, and I had to have some dinner and do some work, but it felt so right.

I listened to it twice in a row.

The next day, I woke up humming, "You're so / faar awwwwaaaaaay / doesn't anybody stay in one place any more..."

A neighborhood ex-marine on Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

The other week, I was out correcting papers at a local bar, and a(n older) (white) guy down the bar from me asked me what I was up to, and we started chit-chatting.

As it turns out, he was a city worker on the verge of retirement, and a life-long Democrat, and a Sanders-Trump voter.

"I was a marine and my son's a marine," the guy was like.  "And I'm not a sexist, but a woman can't lead the armed forces."

Then, he was like, "Just look at her, Hillary's like a wet tampon, if you know what a mean."

He said he voted for Trump, but when I asked him if he liked what he's done so far, he said it's hard to tell what with the media getting on him all the time, and that he's called countries "shitholes" himself so what's the big deal about that, but when I stuck to the question and asked him if he had done anything good so far, he just kind of pursed his lips, and it just seemed to me like he regretted voting for him, but he couldn't say that out loud since it'd be admitting to himself that he was wrong.

I then asked him about Sanders, and if it bothered him that he's a socialist.

"He was?", the guy was like.  "I didn't know that.  I can't remember what it was now, but I liked what he said."

"He was all anti-Wall Street," I was like.

"Yeah!" the guy was like, brightening.  "I liked that."

I then asked him again what he thought about Bernie Sanders being a socialist, and I added that a lot of young kids I taught nowadays, were becoming socialists.

"Well, we're already a socialist country anyhow," the guy was like.  "There's all this free stuff you can get, so that's what they probably like."

. . .

Like a few days later, when I was telling a co-worker about this conversation, I told her that if advocating for *any* kind of public works or social services gets you accused of socialism, you might as well go whole hog big, since you're going to get blamed for it anyways.

She agreed with me.

People.

I'm trying to wean myself from my smartphone.

I do love Twitter, but I've decided to try to wean myself off of my smartphone a lot.

Some of it's good, so I can keep up with labor and higher ed news and radical feminism and whatnot, but sometimes it can turn out to be a huge waste of time.

So, I've been trying to be more purposeful when I use it - for example, not looking at my phone when I get up in the morning, and leaving it in another room so I can have breakfast and read at my dining room table, without interruption or temptation of interruption.

I also used the visual accessibility settings to switch the screen to grayscale, since having bright colors on it tempts you to use it more often and fucks with your neurons and whatnot and makes you all addicted.

News is there of a second, there and gone, but many many books are lasting, and you're better off spending your time reading them.

At one point, I was going through my Facebook activity, and I had liked so many posts that I didn't even remember, or weren't so cool in retrospect.

"Why did I do that?", I thought to myself.

It was all froth, and I was very disappointed in myself, how I had used my time.

Campaigning regrets.

The other week, I got really inspired and quickly outlined and then wrote up a vicious parody, but I had to figure out whether and if so how to go about trying to get it published online.

Trying to get into public office certainly does constrain your behavior, and make you try to avoid anything even the most little bit controversial.

It's a weird feeling, to censor myself like that.

A tale of yogurt.

The other week, me and another caregiver who I overlapped shift with were talking at one of my jobs, and it came up that yogurt can spoil, which I didn't know.

"Oh yeah it can," said my one client, who was there with us.

She said that once she shook up a yogurt to eat it, and then peeled off the top and licked it, only to find out that it was all moldy inside, and that she had licked like pure mold off the peeled-off metal top.

A story of the subway (2 of 2): Bad breath.

Like a week later, I was on the same subway going into work again, and there was a (young) couple next to me, to my left.

Every once in a while, too, I'd catch a whiff of bad breath, but since they were downwind of me, I could tolerate them more.

The guy was talking to the girl in something (Asian)-sounding  as they were looking at their phones, but I could see out of the corner of my eye that she was pretty brown and almost (hispanic)-looking.

Both were clean, so I was surprised about the bad breath thing.

I think it was her.

A story of the subway (1 of 2): Bad breath.

The other week when I was on the subway going into work, this (middle-aged) (slim) (bearded) (kind of homeless-looking) (black) guy sat down next to me, in one of the few open seats on the train.

And then, for like the next ten minutes, every once in a while I'd catch this awful smell, a strong musty mixture of cigarettes and like teeth rotting, just for a brief every second now and then as the train was moving and the small wind that was blowing a bit inside the car blew that smell in my direction.

It started making me sick, so after a few stops, I casually got up and moved over to a different part of the car, to get away from that smell.

I try not to react to homeless people like that, but the smell honestly was making me sick.

Later, I saw that same guy looking at me very casually, and I think he knew that I moved off to another part of the car somehow because of him.