Interesting observation in a higher ed article that I read the other day.

In a higher ed article that I was reading the other day, this guy who transitioned to another professional sector not only said that he met with envy from many professors who had gotten some of the few remaining "good" jobs, but he also said that he was just as productive as many of them, since he continued to write, and what with all the administrative duties and overwork of tenured professor positions nowadays, he could squeeze in as many reading and writing and research hours after work and on weekends as they could probably get out of their workweeks, too.

Years ago when I decided to not pursue any academic jobs, that was my feeling, too, and it's interesting to see it finally getting acknowledged in the higher ed press.

And, it's like my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair) said a while ago when he was getting disenchanted with academia, that the position at the end of everything isn't all that good to reward all the years of hard work and abuse that might lead up to it.

He also had observed that most of the people are pretty awful too, and that at one point recently he realized that he really didn't want to be like any of his advisers and that they were all just awful people with miserable lives, and that that's when he realized that he was just done with academia.

He also said recently that he came across some of the people who had moved on and had gotten some of the "good" jobs, and they're spitting out versions of papers still saying the same thing that they said three years ago, and it's just pathetic, whereas people he knows who left and aren't in academia at all anymore have continued to learn lots of new things and just engage and change and grow.

"I really feel like I left a cult," he was like.

He added that if you ever try to explain to people on the outside the politics of a disciplinary subfield that so-and-so's students don't like so-and-so's because of this one thing that happened years ago, that it all just sounds crazy.

"I really feel like I left a cult," he was like, again.

Concern of a friend from the neighborhood's evangelical sister:

"Incest babies."

I've met her once before years ago when she had visited once, and I saw her again at another party recently when she was in town visiting again, and me and her started talking about cult memoirs.

(She seems to read fundamentalist Mormon "escaped wife" polygamy memoirs, since they seem to confirm to her that mainstream LDS Mormonism is somehow false.  She said she reads Muslim memoirs like that, too.)

Anyhow, when we were talking about the escaped wife memoirs, she mentioned how you can just look at some of the wives and the kids and tell that they're "incest babies," since if you know what to look for, you can tell it.

She then said that that happens, too, with a lot of "urban" families, where guys come through and get all these women pregnant and they all have his kids, then those kids meet and have kids, but they don't know that they have the same father, so they end up having incest babies.

. . .

A recurring bad dream a few times this past month:

I'm teaching freshman writing again, only I forgot that I'm doing it, and I suddenly realize that I've missed teaching a few classes that I should have been at, and I wonder what the kids at school thought when they came to class and I wasn't there, and I can see them assembled in this miniature auditorium in my mind, all of them there without me.

And then, I wake up.

. . .

A sight the other day at like 2am in a very rich neighborhood in the city...

...as I go from one bar that's closing to another bar that's open later:

A homeless person curled up in lots of blankets beneath an umbrella in the entryway of a Barnes & Noble, with laying out beside them on the pavement a paperback of Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now."

Texting with my one art school colleague who wears women's clothes.

The other week I texted my one art school colleague who wears women's clothes and was like -

Btw I had realized that we've seen Stormy Daniels and Madonna together.  Good things come in threes, who's next...?  [emojis of the woman symbol, a flexing arm, and a shiny heart]

- to which he replied first with this text -

Right?!!! That is pretty untouchable twosome

- and then this text -

Too bad Toni Morrison is dead

. . .

Resthome happenings (2 of 2): Chicken leg.

The other week at the resthome after a really nice dinner and everyone had pretty much left, this one resident who can worry quite a bit but is sweet nonetheless went around with a leftover chicken leg that she had put on a small plate and covered with a napkin.

"Would you like it?", she asked everyone, and then she explained that it was perfectly good and she would take it herself and eat it later, but she can't, and she would just hate to see it go to waste.

She offered it to me but I was full and so refused, but after she offered it to some other people and they didn't want it, she still seemed concerned, so I was like, "Okay, I'll take it," and I grabbed the legbone through the napkin and picked it up and started eating it.

"Thank you," she was like.

Then, she was like, "I would eat it myself, it's still perfectly good, but I can't, and I hate to see it sitting there and have it get thrown out."

Resthome happenings (1 of 2): Cat in a box.

So, this one resthome resident who had had a cat had to go and move into a more traditional nursing home, and since she couldn't take her cat with her, people had to scramble and try to find a home for her cat.

First, someone from a suburb came and got the cat, but then brought her back because of an allergy to her fur.

Then, a supervisor had a friend who was looking for a companion cat to her cat, and she brought the cat over there, but then the cat didn't work out, and they had to bring her back.

Now, she's living with the new resthome resident who's worked in communications, since he's had cats before.

The first day I got there and the cat was there, his closet door was open and you could see boxes of supplies, and a taller thin box was open and the cat was just sitting in there on the remaining supplies, visible from the mid-point up and just calm as all be and just looking out at the world from her place in the box.