A joke of my client.

The other week I started shift at the home of the one disabled woman who I provide assisted living services for, and my one coworker who was going off shift told her, "Okay, I'm going to take a pee and leave."

"I've heard that before," she was like.

 . . .

(That one client of mine has a really dirty sense of humor.)

Higher education's dirty laundry is coming out more and more, it seems...

Not just the harassment and discrimination, but also the abusiveness of individual profs, like with the NYU Avital Ronell case that's been grabbing headlines.

My one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair) observed that it's not unrelated to the awful tenure-track job market: people who were made to suffer abuse have nothing to lose, when there's nothing there at the end, after all the years of shittiness and awfulness.

As he put it, "Why not?".

This stuff is really endemic, and I think *all* the shit's going to pour out, more and more.

These situations are a natural outgrowth of the tenure system, which tends to advance people who humor the arbitrariness of others, and who see their own tenure as the highest good.  Since there's no check-and-balances like with an Inspector General system like there is in our federal government and in municipalities, there's no one to "check in" with a random audit and make sure everything is on the up-and-up.

Lately I've been thinking that what higher ed needs is mandated internal audits of graduate education in any school that receives federal funds, and then randomized Dept. of Education audits of those internal audits, with wider probes where there's discrepancies.

That kind of thing would keep tenured profs on their toes, and nip anything like the Ronell case way the f*ck in the bud, before it had any chance to start.

It'd have to be very carefully defined so as to avoid any politicized penalization of academic content, but some things like unanswered emails, profs not working over summers, etc., are just basic professionalism in education and research, in which there's massive abuse of public interest.

At the most, this would also occur with maybe undergraduate theses, too.  The most abuses seem to occur in cases of sustained pedagogical relationships around large projects.

Another story of the resthome: Talk of Stormy Daniels.

The one retired doctor thought that it was the best thing in the world that I went with a friend to go see Stormy Daniels, and now we always joke about her.

So like one time when he was coming out after a shower and I asked if I should go pull the blinds down and he said no, I was like, "Okay, give the neighbors a show if you want to, Stormy."

And, another time when his wife was saying that he was walking at a restaurant with his walker and something happened since he moved a certain way and so his pants fell down in front of everyone and she was so embarrassed, I was like, "But that's just Stormy being Stormy."

The other week, I was going to help him get ready for bed, too, and I was going into his bedroom from the bathroom to go put his dirty pants in the laundry, when out of the bathroom he fires his shirt after me.

"Way to go Stormy!", I was like, and I walked over to go pick it up, and there he was shirtless on the toilet.

And, he pointed at his man-boobs to me and was like, "I have tits too, but hers are bigger."

Some stories of the resthome.

At this one event they have some weeks where people reminisce about a topic, the topic last time was childhood pranks and whatnot.

One woman remembered how for two years her and her brothers saved up cardboard shoe polish tin inserts so they could get a thousand of them and send them in for a soccer ball, and they finally did that and played soccer for like two weeks, and then someone kicked it over the fence and this mean neighborhood guy wouldn't give it back.

"We waited all that time, and we played for two weeks!", she was like.

Another woman remembered how her eldest daughter got glasses at a young age, like three or four years old maybe, so they put them on a little nylon string to keep them on her so they wouldn't fall down and break and she wouldn't lose them, and her daughter thought it was the funniest thing in the world to try to take them off and pitch them over the neighbor's fence, so her mom would have to run around and go get them.

That night at dinner, a(n elderly) (French) resident said she had something for me, and it was a little rubber rainbow Pride bracelet, that someone gave her at her doctor's office.

"I saw that and thought of you and thought that you would like it," she was like.

Black bean shit.

The other week, I cooked up a huge pot of black beans, for beans and rice.

Then, every night I had a big bowl of beans and rice for dinner, and a salad with it, and sometimes a hardboiled egg.

One morning a night after a few nights after I cooked up that one huge pot of black beans, I took a shit, and after I looked at it, I noticed that it was a single long piece of shit, the same exact color as the black beans.

New hobby of my one (half Sudanese) (half British) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair).

Not only has my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair) been gardening this summer like he has been the past few years, but he also found a few caterpillars on his plants and brought them inside, and he's now keeping them on his mantel in some jars with tin foil on top with a few airholes poked in it, and some leaves inside of them for them to eat.

"Look at them!", he was like when I was over at his apartment, "Munch munch munch."

He looked up the species online, and said that they're definitely butterflies of some type.

He also said that he had a third, but he found it dead after an air bnb guest came and left the air conditioning on high for a while one night.

"It was too much for him, I think," he was like.

Comment of a coworker from (Montenegro)...

...when I saw her after the World Cup game, and asked if she had rooted for (Croatia):

"Yes, but it didn't help."