Visit (1 of 4): Late-night cat disturbance.

The other week I was visiting my uncle's, and at like 4 in the morning his cat started meowing outside my door.

I tried to go back to sleep, but then it started up again, and this happened like 3 or 4 times.

So, I started freaking out that the cat was trying to tell me something like my uncle wasn't okay or something and my heart started leaping in my chest, so I leapt out of bed and went outside my room to go check on everything.

But, my uncle was okay, and I could hear him breathing through his cracked door in the hallway outside his room.

And, the cat led me into the kitchen and stood over by its food, where I noticed that its dish was empty.

So, I went and filled it, but then I noticed that I had picked up a jar of treats instead and dumped them into the bowl, so I picked the bowl back up and dumped those back into the treat jar, and then I went and found the container of real cat food and filled the bowl with it.

Problem solved.

Fond memory of a resident: Memories of her youth.

At the resthome, this one cool resident who grew up in (Austria) to a (Hungarian) family passed away a few months ago.

I only knew that she had spoken (German) in her youth and I had always just assumed that she was (German), but then it turned out later that she told me that her family was (Hungarian) and that she spoke (Hungarian) with them at home, though her husband was (German) and she never really had a chance to speak (Hungarian) outside of her girlhood home, it was just something from that brief time in her life.

Anyhow, like a month before she died, she discovered that she could find old (Hungarian) songs on YouTube, and she was just overflowing with delight and joy to not only hear (Hungarian) spoken again, but also to reencounter all of these songs from her youth that she hadn't heard in like 70 years or more.

I'm so glad that she found that, before she died.

She even sang me a snatch of a line, once, and helped me work through the (Hungarian).

Misery in academia.

The other week this "successful" academic I know from a decently older cohort in my program - "successful" in that she now has tenure at a college somewhere - posted the most astonishing few tweets to Twitter within a few hours of each other.

One tweet asked how many times a day was it okay to cry, between your car and your office and in the parking lot.

The other tweet said that sometimes she just wanted to quit.

And, her handle was her own professional name and thus easily findable through Google.

And, replies included another young tenured professor who said that she's cried at meetings a few times.

What misery they have, and how publicly filtered, almost like they have no friends or people to rely on anywhere close to them, so they just put it all out there in weird ways. 

I wonder if this type of misery was always out there, among young tenured faculty?

Part of me suspects that it was, but now everything is heightened, and they had to sacrifice more to get a job that they don't necessarily like all that much in a place that they don't necessarily like all that much, and maybe their schools are financially distressed to boot.

And who knows, maybe they don't have a real passion for what they study and maybe their schools increasingly focus on serving the privileged, so they don't necessarily have a sense of meaningful work to ground them.  Maybe.

It really makes me realize what good life choices I made, to just avoid the whole nonsense of trying to compete for the few of the tenure-track jobs that are left.  Unless you have money and time to burn as you spin wheels and look for a good situation, you're just better off avoiding that nonsense altogether.

The dream of another: Bar.

The other week, the one retired school nurse at the resthome told me that she had dreamnt that she was sitting in a bar, drinking Scotch out of a beer bottle.

. . .

(The previous week a friend of hers had come over with expensive Scotch and they had a glass together; she's a Scotch fan, it turns out.)

Bro campus (2 of 2): Being nearby

When I was in the basement stacks area of the library of the smaller school nearby the bro campus, a (30s-ish) (Asian) library worker had to show me how to use the manual cranks to roll away and open up the compressed shelving.

"This is good exercise," I was like.

"Yes," he was like, and then he said that at the nearby bro campus, shelves were electric and you could just push a button.

"That doesn't make sense," I was like.  "Why do we have these shelves, but they have all the guys with big arm muscles?".

Bro campus (1 of 2): Being there.

The other week, I headed to the preppy bro campus on the edge of the city, to meet a friend who studies there for coffee and to use the library there and at a nearby smaller school.

It blows my mind that their school color is a rich purple, and you have all these rich young bros dressed in purple just walking around here and there, though there's less of them than you'd think.

It's all just vaguely erotic.

Subway interaction around dirtying clothes.

The other week I was sitting on the subway with my legs crossed, and a (late middle-aged) (black) lady in a tasteful puffy black coat and with nice shoulder-length hair under a knit cap walked by me and accidentally brushed her light grey jogging pants against the sole of my shoe.

"Sorry," she was like.

"No, I'm sorry!", I was like, as she was walking past me to the train car door, since I was thinking of the dirt I got on her light colored clothes.

At that, she quickly turned her head to look at me, and suddenly she gave me a little smile as she stuck her tongue out all curved in a mischievous way.