"The daily grind."

It really sucks that I can pretty much only find near-minimum wage jobs right now, and that I have to commute like 45 minutes to an hour each way, to boot.

And, they're "second shift," too (like early afternoon to late evening).

It really is a lot of hours commuting, and I miss out on evening meetings and movies and stuff, and meeting friends sometimes.

It's like my new "daily grind."  Though I do spend them reading, it's so many hours on the subway.

Sigh.

A dream of pale gray rice.

The other week I dreamt -

I open up my fridge and get out my one small cracked Tupperware container that I still use, and there's rice in it.

I open up the lid and examine them closely, and they're pale gray.

. . .

(I had been buying bacon lately and then frying it along with bread to soak up the fat and eat, and then leaving any residual grease in the pan to flavor any rice I cooked soon afterwards, so maybe I was envisioning that having visual effects.  Dreams are weird like that, since they can be riffs off small things happening in everyday life.)

My upstairs neighbors are just really immature for their age.

They're all like early-to-mid-20s, and two are out of school from a tech school, and one works at a restaurant.

Often, they have people over to play Dungeons and Dragons.

The other day like noon on a Sunday, one did a drum routine just pounding on a table (maybe along to some music that I couldn't hear?), for like a couple minutes, and I could hear it through my floor.

Honestly, who the f*ck does that.

I'd been noticing some growing maturity problems with freshpersons in my classes, and I wonder if it's a generational thing, with the kids coming up.

A disturbing beggar on the subway the other day:

A (thin) (young) (black) guy just stands in the middle of the aisle on a crowded car, after coming between cars and asking for money.

He doesn't get any, and I continue to read my magazine.

As he walks down the aisle asking for money, he waves his fingers by the edge of my magazine, almost between my eyes and the magazine, so he'll catch my attention.

Very aggressive, and very desperate, though he was so calm.

Did he think that I would give him money?

Probably not.  

But, it took him no time, and he must have needed it a lot.

So weird and disturbing.  Begging in the city is just up, both in the number of people who are doing it, and how they're doing it, since it's at a whole different level.

Some types of person, on the subway:

1) Those who pull out their phone, and listen to music or watch video with the volume on LOUD.

2) Those who just seem out-of-it, and either wear headphones or stare out into space, and pull out a big bag of chips and Doritos, and proceed to eat every single chip with their mouth open, crunching and then chewing just blatantly.

Comment of a (young) (black) elementary school kid...

...when I was biking to work in very early afternoon, the other day:

"You're going good!"

(He shouted this at me as he toddled along the sidewalk with his backpack on, and he threw his arm out and gave me a thumbs-up at the same time.  It made my day.)

Observations on millennial undergraduates.

This year it seems like a lot of the millennial undergraduates are rather immature for their age.

There's always been some of that, maybe 0-2 out of 30-some, but this year it feels like 4-6 out of 30-some.

They talk to each other in class, or have weird fragile egos, or spin their pens on their hands nervously and prominently in the middle of class.

The other week, one girl was holding out a strand of her hair and twirling it, while chewing gum!

It really does set a tone more like a high school classroom and not college, so much.

I think this happens at other places, but at the "elite" college I teach at?  It's weird.  Honestly, where do these kids come from?

It really does feel more and more like a dodged a bullet, by not pursuing becoming a professor.  I can't imagine being beholden to students like this, for decades.

I was texting about this with my one (modern Czech literature) professor friend, and she said maybe more of them are more immature, but that the thing that really bothers her with millennials is that they "lack affect" (i.e. that they don't show the same range of emotion as past generations).

She's also wondering if they'll understand themes about the repressiveness of the communist state, in some of the 20th c. lit that she's teaching for the first time in eons.