A lost post.

So much has been happening this past month, I can't remember what some of my notes that I made for blogposts indicated.

For example, I have notes about a funny comment made by the one resthome resident who I always joke with -

the last th[in]g you want in a pandemic is an [illegible - something like Eng. stk].

I can't remember why she said it, but I know she said it because there's a note about flowers, either the flowers she got sent by an old physical therapist of hers, or because of a flower I got from a bush outside and put in her pocket for her, when we popped outside for a bit while she was waiting for her appointment to happen downstairs in an office off of the lobby.

So much of our lives passes by like that: no real record, no real memory.

English toponyms.

Do you ever notice that we don't think about the origins of English placenames, even when they're sitting right out in front of us?

Like, "Oxford" is probably like a place where an ox can ford a stream, but we don't even separate the word like that, it's just "Oxford" to us.

It's funny when you read another language and there's places that are named like that, you have to wonder if they separated out the meaning then like we do now.

Grocery list forgetfulness.

Because I had practically drained out all of my pantry to avoid going to the grocery store for like ever because of the coronavirus crisis, I made sure to write up a huge list ahead of time on the back of an envelope, so I could keep it and add to it as I remembered things, before I went to the grocery store, so I wouldn't miss out on buying anything that I needed.

The funny thing was, for like a week after making up the list, I'd suddenly remember that I'd need something else, and then when I went to go add it to the list, I found it already on there.

That happened to me with paprika, celery salt, jello, and wine, and maybe a few things that I'm forgetting now.

3 foods, 1 day.

Last month at the resthome, the one (white) (gay) (male) nurse in my department ordered some Domino's pizzas for lunch for him and for someone else, and afterwards he left the leftovers out for everyone else.

I had like 6 pieces, and they were so good; one had green peppers and flakes of steak on it, and the other one had pepperoni and pieces of bacon and was a bit salty, but it was still so good.  I made sure that no-one else wanted them and I offered to the nurse to chip in some money, but he said it was okay and since no-one else wanted any, I was able to get all 6 of them for free.

It was funny, I had just been getting sick of eating my own food and the staff meal at the resthome because the coronavirus crisis had been keeping me from eating out, and then there was that meal, for free.

Later, too, the one resthome resident who I joke with about being a partier gave me some leftover grapes that she had in her room, since she said she thought that they were good but she couldn't eat any more and so she thought that I would like them.

And, after the staff meal, my one (older) (Tibetan) coworker made sure that I got a big salad to take home, since my one (cool) (Muslim) coworker from (Ethiopian) didn't want hers that night.

Which was also nice, since I've been running out of vegetables at home and this will stretch out my supplies and push back my grocery shopping even more.

Encounters with (tenured) people.

The other week I was talking on the phone with a friend in psychology who got his Ph.D. when he was like mid-career in another sector, and is now (tenured) at a decently rural regional campus at what I thought was a decently-funded and well-run state university system.

He's tried to make it work and has gotten tenure, but he hasn't really made it work for the long-term for years, and he hasn't found the right opportunity to transfer into a professorship in a major metropolitan area.

He's now stuck it out through his first sabbatical, and he was telling me that he's coming back to the city this summer onward and is going to scope out other jobs that might let him switch out of academia and move back.

We were also talking about coronavirus effects, and he said that his classes can't get too much larger, and if they do, or if they ask him to teach another class, he's out.

I was pretty floored, since I had thought that he had had it pretty good, all things considered.

A few weeks before that, too, I caught up with a friend from my Master's who now has tenure at a top-tier university in a major metropolitan area, and though she's happy with her family, it seems like she has malaise, and is just kind of stuck working on her book that expands ideas from the last chapter of her first book.

I also saw a research notice for an old professor of mine, and they were still making some same point about their research that they were making years ago, like it was some ground-breaking thing that absolutely everyone should know and that should change the way that absolutely everyone thinks.

It was like my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair) observed to me last year, that you lose track of people you know who remained in academia, and then you find them years later and they're still saying the same thing, it's kind of sad.

He also said that that's apart from the sadness of the content of what they're saying, since all too often it's something that's pretty simple but is just dressed up to brand themselves or to make themselves look like they're some kind of movers and shakers, and they're just like this for years at a time.

"It's kind of pathetic," he was like.

. . .

(He was saying this in regards to lifelong learning; he was saying that people he knows who aren't in academia have continued to learn and they learn even more stuff and more vigorously and more rewardingly so than the people he knows who remained in academia.)

A dream of modern opera.

The other week I dreamnt -

I'm in the far upper balcony of a modern auditorium, and like two-thirds of the seats are filled up with people sprawled between them, and the audience is mostly young and mostly white, like people in their twenties and thirties.

It's a competition of modern operas, with musicians and singers visible onstage, and it's already the afternoon of the first day of the competition, with a lot of the operas having happened before, since they're mostly all short.

After the (older) (white) (female) announcer in a purplish-blue shouldered jacket is onstage with a (young) (white) guy with a short haircut and in glasses and a tuxedo and he knowingly hints about how different his opera is, another opera starts, and people start to realize that it's by another (young) (white) (gay) composer who think he's being clever by putting stuff about cruising and casual sex into the art form, but in fact it's just really uninspired and repetitive, and there's not really any drama and the music isn't even that good or interesting, to boot.

So, most everyone stays in their seats, but like two or three people and me besides get up and start to go, and we start walking past people in our rows to get to the aisles and head out, since we have better things to do with our time, and I see this last part from like fifteen-to-twenty feet above the ground, off to the upper right corner of the balcony I'm in.

And then, I wake up.

. . .

Chalk drawings from the landlord's children upstairs.

The other week, I was walking my bicycle outside from my back porch to go bicycle to the subway station to go to work, and I noticed that my landlord's children had been drawing with chalk on the sidewalk outside our house (they live upstairs).

By the stairs going up to the sidewalk, there was all of these rows of tight stripes, like I'd guess maybe 14-17 stripes in all, almost like a rainbow in shading, but not a rainbow in shape, and it was crude, but somehow really interesting to look at it, because the combination of colors was not quite organized as you'd expect, and sometimes the same color would be repeated for like 2 or 3 stripes in a row.

The next day, I went to go sit on my stoop, and I noticed different stick figures, and that someone had circled the "O" on the "WELCOME" mat, too.