A dream of a dirty floor.

The other week I dreamnt:

I'm standing in a relatively empty room that has a gray shellacked concrete floor, and behind me about a yard or so is a large roughly plastered white concrete pillar, and over to my right a bit is someone, and we're mad because there's an empty schooldesk in front of us and it seems somehow disheveled, and I know that some thoughtless young 20-something hipster girl left it all messy, though now she's nowhere to be found.

In my head, I can see her, with a black cap drawn over dark curls and a pale face with pancake makeup, her head drawn into the folds of her large frumpy bulky black coat hiding her body in its large folds, though she doesn't seem particularly large or particularly petite, instead she's rather solidly-built and middle-framed, though I can just see her from her shoulders up.  In my head, her eyes are downcast, but not out of shame, but rather self-absorption.

I draw closer, and all over the floor right by the schooldesk, forming a box of relatively neat parallel lines bumping into each other, and then in a shorter close-together zigzag off diagonally just beyond that, is like a set of full dull mauve lipstick smears, straight full lines again and again and again forming almost a constant patch of color in the square, though if you look closely at it you can see a bit of floor peeking up between each line, in the solid patch of color.

. . .

A dream of garlic.

The other week, I dreamnt:

I'm at a kitchen counter peeling very small cloves of garlic, each maybe a third of an inch long.

Every time I pull a small clove off the bulb and dig my nail into it and peel away the papery thin layer on top, there's nothing left inside it like garlic garlic, only just husk through and through, nothing more.

I do this with a number of the very small cloves around the outer edge of the bulb, then I finally take a larger clove and start to dig into it, thinking that I'll finally get some garlic garlic...

...and then I wake up.

. . .

I may finally be able to budget!

So, after all this time, I may finally have a handle on jobs, and be getting consistent hours through just 2 part-time jobs.

So, for the first time in probably 7-8 years, I'll be able to have a monthly budget.

What with all my academic jobs, I effectively had a "boom and bust" budget cycle, where I worked a lot and gradually heaped up money throughout the academic year, and then had it deplete over the summer when I worked relatively less, and sometimes due to employment shifts I couldn't even count on having the work I thought I would have, sometimes.

So, between that and unpredictable fees and random price increases in utilities and everything, I really had no idea how to budget, except to live cheaply all the time, like literally all the time.

I'll still do that, but at least I'll be able to put a dollar amount to expenditures.

It's like I'll be fiscally disciplined or something.  Though, it's not like right now I make enough to save for a house or retirement (if I lived at absolute bare minimum with next to no recreation or travel, I could maybe save a couple thousand a year!!!!!!!!).

On another note, I'll never forget when Affordable Care Act first came down and the details of all situations hadn't quite been hashed out yet, and my monthly income at just that moment was abnormally low and seemed to qualify me for Medicaid (!), and the person on my phone said to file my income using the "seasonal farm worker" category.

Seriously.

It makes sense, though, it's "boom or bust" work tied to employment that varies by the season.

The mystery of the thumps from the upstairs neighbors.

So, sometimes in the morning, I'd hear these weird thumps coming from upstairs, like one or two in quick succession, and since I'd been working 2nd shift and would be ass tired and sleeping in a lot of times, if they woke me up like nine or ten in the morning, I'd yell out, "Be quiet!".

Then, I think they went away.

Like a week or two after that happened, I was talking with my one upstairs neighbor and he was like, 'We finally figured out what was making that noise."

It turned out to be some old dumpy computer chair that the guy who lived above me had, and it wasn't that good anyways and they had been planning to throw it out, so they threw it out.

Isn't that nice of them?

A story of a Holocaust survivor, on how she met her husband.

So, the other week I found out that a client I work with is a Holocaust survivor.

She's short and in her 90s and I'd known her a bit from different shifts, and she mentioned something about her (Hungarian) husband's past at one point when we were chit-chatting, and so I asked her how they met.

"I was in the Holocaust," she began, "And I lost all my family."

And, that's how the story started.

After she got out of the concentration camp, she didn't know what to do, she was all alone, but she knew of some distant relatives in Budapest, and so she wrote them, telling them what happened, and that she didn't have anyone.

Her husband knew them and heard of her through them, and he had lost all of his family, too.

"I would like to write that girl," he said, and so he got permission from her relatives and her address and they began writing, and they wrote and they wrote and they wrote and they wrote and shared everything with one another, and they "truly understood one other," and at one point he shared a photograph, and he proposed marriage and she accepted, and then he went to meet her in Paris, where she had ended up on her way to the United States.

"So where did you meet him for the first time?", I was like.

"At the train station," she was like.

"But how did you find each other?", I was like.

"We wrote and agreed to wear something and the other knew," she was like.  "I had a dress and I wrote him, and that day I put on that dress.  He wrote me, he will wear a dark grey coat, and a carnation."

Then, she was like, "That day, I saw a man in a dark grey coat and a red carnation, and it was far, but he was so ugly.  I was upset, but I told myself, 'He is beautiful, and you can learn to love him.'  And I waved, and he waved, and I came closer, and he was so ugly...

"Then, out from behind him stepped another man, in a dark grey coat and a carnation, and it was [her husband's name], and that is the first time I saw him."

Then, her husband said they would go to the visa office, and they talked to the officials and he got her an extension, and they stayed in Paris for two weeks "and that was our honeymoon."

Through a Jewish charity group, they stayed in an awful boarding house and had one meal a day, "and we were as poor as church mice, and so happy," she said.

Healthcare for the aging is a growing sector...

...but the part that doesn't make the news, is that most jobs let you pull in $24-32K a year.

That's hardly enough to maintain a family, and there's no way you can save to buy a home or for retirement on that.

If this is one of the "healthy" parts of our economy, we've got another thing coming.

Another subway happening:

Somewhere towards the front of the car, someone has a radio out, and it plays smooth 70s R&B the entire ride.