Pleasant coworkers.

I can't get over how nice all my coworkers are at my one resthome job.

People are always helping each other out, and sometimes we bring in food for each other.

The other week, I brought in a day-old apricot coffee cake that I had gotten for half-off at this one (Italian) bakery that's near where I get my haircut, since I had stopped through there after getting my haircut like I often tend to do.

I left it out on the table in our office with a plastic knife, and people kept getting bits of it all night.  My one (African-American) coworker really liked it and I told her she should take some home for her mom and her sister if there was any left at the end of shift, but there turned out to be not that much left, and she said to leave it for the night shift, which we did.

A dream of my uncle.

The other week I dreamnt:

I am in a room and am sitting down at a table, and my maternal uncle is standing above me, and he's a bit thinner and a bit younger and his hair is darker, and he's leaning in over me and is unnaturally in-my-face and aggressive.

From what he's saying, I find out that he's taken a post-retirement job as a union buster, and he's trying to call me out for my unthinking support of unions, and to justify himself.

. . .

Hanukkah memories.

The other day when I was working at the resthome, I was very surprised that the retired psychiatrist went down to the candle-lighting service, since he usually doesn't attend stuff like that.

Afterwards, he told me that he really enjoyed it, and that when he had looked at the program and the songs in Hebrew that they were going to sing, he didn't recognize any of them, but when people had started singing, he recognized some of the melodies, and he hadn't heard them in years.

A memory of petition season.

Back when I had to go and gather a lot of signatures in order to qualify for the ballot, me and a (younger) (white) guy who was born and bred in the neighborhood but had just moved back from Florida where he was for a few years but then decided he didn't like it got to talking, as he was waiting for the bus.

First off, he couldn't sign for me, since he hadn't changed his voter registration back to the neighborhood yet.

Second, he was pretty sympathetic to the task of getting signatures, and he said that you have to have a "tough skin."

He did it himself for different campaigns years ago back before he moved to Florida, he said, and he said people gave him crap and threw him attitude all the time when he was out doing it.

At least for me, that was a relief.  Somehow I thought that I was the only person to get that!  I guess not...  The older I get, the more it really comforts me to find out that other people have experienced the same difficulties that I have.

Cat puke.

Sometimes, the cat of my one client with disabilities throws up, and there's a pile of cat puke on the floor.

Usually, it has chunks of largely undigested crunchy cat food in it, in a clear-to-brown liquid.

At first it made me decently nauseated to clean up, but now it doesn't really bother me at all.

I usually take a paper towel and fold it over a few times, and then I kind of mop it up and pick it up at the same time, and then I go and throw the paper towel into the trash, with the cat puke safely in the middle of it. 

And then, I go and take a fresh paper towel and put some cleaning spray on it, and wipe over the area where the cat puke was, just to make sure that it's all clean and fresh and there's no cat puke liquid residue sitting out on the hardwood floor in her apartment, since that might corrupt the floorboards or the finish on them or something.

Sometimes, depending on how much liquid there is in the cat puke, I can feel a sort of moist warmth coming through the towel onto my hand, when I'm taking the cat puke paper towel to the trashcan.

An observation by that one retired psychiatrist: Porn stigma.

The other day at the resthome I was assisting that one retired psychiatrist, and as we sometimes do, we started talking about Stormy Daniels.

From there our conversation went off into talking about porn more generally, and I was telling him about tidbits from this one oral history of the (straight) porn industry that I had read years ago.

For example, that people ogle the actors at bars, but treat them like social outcasts and don't really interact with them or respect them.

"That's entirely unsurprising," he was like, "The same thing happened back when I was in it..."

On another note, he ran over his wife's foot when he was in his motorized wheelchair, and her one toe now is all black and blue.

She took a photo of it and blew it up and printed it out and hung it on his wall in his living room, so he sees it every day.

"Is that to make you feel guilty?", I was like.

"I would assume," he was like.

A culture of passing petitions.

One of the things that's been very striking from my campaign has been how the old political machine people have a culture of passing petitions to gather signatures so that people can become candidates.

Overall, the city I live in has an absolutely absurd amount of signatures that a person needs to get for them to get on the ballot, so it's a challenge for any challenger, but an incumbent knows the ropes and has the money and the bodies to do it pretty easily, especially if they're from neighborhoods with petition-passing culture; people know the drill, they get a clipboard, and they run around and snag signatures from friends and family and people they know in the neighborhood, or even people they bump into.

This has been something that I've been thinking about, and then the other week, I ran into a (white) (progressive) woman who I know from the neighborhood, and she was in the bar with a(n older) (white) (male) friend of hers from a different neighborhood, but one with a similar petition-passing culture among the born-and-bred residents there.

So, I was telling them about my thoughts on this, and how younger gentrifiers who think of themselves as progressives just don't have that same level of familiarity with the culture and even the process, and the one guy who she knows who I had just met totally agreed.

And, he told me about the time that he went to this one wake in the family of someone running for judge, and one of the family members had a clipboard and was going up the line of the people waiting to pay their respects at the casket.