My apartment's just filthy.

Between how much I work and how much I campaign, my apartment can get just filthy.

Right now I really need to clean the bathroom floor, and this dirt tracked into the hallway, and scrub my refrigerator, and do all of my laundry that's been piling up.

But, it's hard to find the time or the energy, and it really doesn't bother me that much, so I don't.

Levity at the resthome: My temporary confusion.

The other night when I was working at the resthome, I come out of a room and my one (Filipina) coworker is coming down the hallway and saying my name and is holding out this thin, couple inch long rectangle box thing at me, and at first I think it's a mezuzah that's fallen off someone's doorpost, and she wants me to come help her figure out how to reattach it.

Then, I realize it's a small long thin specialty chocolate bar that she wants me to have.

I took it, and later I showed it to a resident, and they agreed it kind of looked like a mezuzah from a distance.

A little bit later than that, I told the story again to another resident, but when I went to go reach for the chocolate bar to go and show them its shape, I realized that I had already eaten it, and there was just an empty crumpled wrapper in my uniform smock pocket.

Lesbian chorus trivia.

The other week at my one client's house, my (lesbian) coworker was going off shift, and was heading off to her lesbian chorus practice.

"So what do you say for good luck, like 'break a leg' or 'break an ovary' or what," I was like.

At that, my one client laughed and was like, "TTG," and I was like, "What?", and then my coworker explained that the conductor will whisper "TTG" to them a lot right after they go onstage and before they start singing.

As it turns out, TTG is a singing posture acronym telling them to straighten their backs and put their chests out, only instead of being like "Straighten your backs," it's, "Tits to the Goddess!".

Rain story (2 of 2): Umbrella.

Like a few days later, I was walking to work, and I had my umbrella out since it was raining pretty hard.

It was windy, too, and by the time I got to the resthome, my pants were soaked from the hip down, since that's how much the rain was blowing underneath my umbrella.

Thankfully, our new uniforms are of some kind of synthetic material, and my pantlegs dried out during the forty minute meeting that started off my shift.

Rain story (1 of 2): Lake.

Last month, I was leaving my one client's with disabilities's house, and it was just pouring, like the hardest rain you can imagine.

She's always joked about the lake in front of her house, and after heavy rains a few times before I'd seen like a large puddle by one corner of the intersection, a bit of which stuck out almost into the middle of the side street.

I'd never seen anything like this before, though.

It was honestly like rain covered more than half the road, and was up over the curb and onto the sidewalk, and I had to walk onto the highest parts of the mulch heap up on the grass strip between the sidewalk and the street, and the water just stretched down the side street like that, flowing a lot, and then as I walked upstream it was out and around into the main street, where I had to kind of find the shortest across part of the puddle and hop out into like an inch of water, since there was no way I could jump across it and onto dry pavement.

I got soaked as I walked to the subway, too.

Right when I got to the subway, too, I not only just missed a train, but the rain died down.

In retrospect, I should have waited some.

A conversation with an artist voter in my district.

The other week I was at one of the neighborhood bars, and I bumped into this one (older) (Asian immigrant) artist who I've met before, and we talked a bit about local politics and my campaign, especially affordable housing issues, which she's super concerned about.

She was a bit down from national politics and had been drinking all evening, and when I ordered chips, she asked for one, so I shared it with her, and later I ordered a big packet of Beernuts, and I shared them with her, too.

"Please, have as many as you want!", I was like.  "My dad won a hundred dollars on a scratch-off ticket and sent me fifty, so you can thank him for that!"

Like right after that, she started talking about the difficulty of declining funding sources for artists, and how the NEA had been on the downswing with funding since the Bush years, and how it was really depressing, and she kept saying stuff like that.

All of a sudden, then, I started laughing to myself, and I told her, "Sorry, I really shouldn't be making jokes with voters, I've been telling myself I have to stop doing this, but..." - and at this point my tone-of-voice became a bit theatrical - "...you mean to say... " - and at that I gestured at the Beernuts - "...that you're not content with peanuts?".

And then I just laughed and laughed at my own joke, really heartily.

She smirked a bit, too, but only for a second, and then she grimaced and like immediately gave me the finger.

She held it up right in front of my face.

Toenails.

I really like clipping my toenails.

I've noticed lately that the nails on my little toes are getting flatter, so it's easier to push back the cuticles and then clip off the nail, straight across in a big flat straight line.

Every time, too, I feel that the end of my big toenails are catching at my sock, I stop and pull off my sock and go and look, and what do you know, it's time to clip my toenails again.

My one (lesbian) coworker used to work in a foot clinic years ago, and she knows a lot about diseases of the foot and leg, as well as their healthy condition.

She said that toenails change over the course of your life, and that the nails in particular get thicker.

Oddly, I had been noticing that lately at the resthome, with a few residents whose bedtime routines involve feet.

Each of them is like 90 or a hundred, and their toenails are very thick and humped, almost more like talons than toenails.

I wonder how or even if you clip toenails like that, when you get older.

I think the resthome has a special guy come in every once in a while, to check people's feet and maybe clip their toenails for them.