Exchange with a (Tibetan) coworker: Teasing, Kamala Harris.

The other week I ran into my one (Tibetan) coworker with an inappropriate sense of humor on the rooftop patio at the resthome, since she was out there with a resident.

"I hope that this woman is treating you okay," I said to the resident, and then I had to repeat myself since they had earbuds in.

"Did you say 'okay'?", the resident was like.  "I can't hear you!"

And, after that, they weren't quite like themselves and they seemed not to be interested in what I was saying for some reason and they even didn't bother to try to find out what it was, so my coworker made a sassy "ha ha ha" mug at me and stuck out her tongue a bit, to mock me.

Later, I asked her about Kamala Harris as Biden's VP pick, and it turns out that she *loves* her.

"I saw her on TV, with what is his name, Kavanaugh," she was like. "She is great."

A late-night sight by my apartment building...

...as I come home at like 2:45am, and I go to walk my bike around to the covered back porch where I store it:

An orange-and-white cat sitting on the black rubber doormat on the front stoop of my apartment building, just sitting there as the entire street is entirely quiet and not paying any attention at all to me, looking off in another direction and not even looking at anything in particular.

And, it just sits there as I go around the side of the house.

After I got my bike inside and came in through the back door, I peeked out my front window, and the cat was gone.

Witnessed spontaenous exchange.

A few weeks ago on my commute in to work at my one assisted living client's with disabilities, I scoped out a safe section of the subway car to sit in, and I ended up at one pretty empty end of the car catty-corner from this (tall) (skinny) (dopey-looking) (mid-20s) (cleancut) (Latino) kid with brown leather boots and crisp jeans and a polo shirt, and most importantly a surgical mask properly worn over his mouth, with the top up over his nose and the bottom down over his chin.

Like seven to eight stops later, he gets up, and as he's waiting by the door to walk out as the train is sliding into the station, a (young) (dreaded) (black) guy walks by the door to wait, too, and I hear the (Latino) kid say, "Nice shirt," and I look, and the (black) kid's shirt says -

ALEXA, GIVE ME A BLOWJOB

. . .

Fascinating African language trivia.

The other day at my one resthome job, I was looking up some information on Wikipedia on African language families, to see if some of the languages that some of my coworkers from (Ghana) know are related to one another.

And, I came across a reference to how Twi has something called "tone terracing"!

I knew Twi had tones, but I had no idea about that, or even that something like that existed.

Basically, it's when someone who's speaking that language talks and they hit a low tone, and thereonafter in that sentence the high and middle tones get dragged downward, because they had hit a low tone.

Aren't languages weird and fascinating?

Two bits of rot:

1) Like the last 4 or 5 tortillas from a 2nd big package of them that had been around for like a month in my one refrigerator drawer, where if you looked at them, here and there there was these little pale blue dots on them, of mold just beginning.

2) Some brownish-blackish-yellowish areas on some organic celery bunches in another refrigerator drawer of mine, where like some of the leaves were all gunky, and where there was a few spots on a few stalks here and there, and otherwise a few whole entire stalks, like they had been pervaded and rotted from within, like that whole part of the organism had just collapsed into this sickly yellow thing with the healthy green fading out from beneath it.

Special errand.

After I finished the new Hunger Games prequel, I made sure to leave early for work one day, so I could hop off the train, return the book to the main library, and then hurry on up to the next subway stop so I could catch the next train and get to work on time.

Usually I would just return it to the branch library near my house, but I figure it's a high demand book right now and someone could maybe really use it, especially with everything that's going on, and so it's better to return it to where it can be sent out quicker to whoever's next on the waiting list.

Addendum, on the tenured.

My one art school colleague who wears women's clothes was saying that the thing that never makes sense to him is the named chairs who ascend a bit into these mid-level administrative positions where they have to do the central admin's dirty work.

"It's not that much money," he was like, "and it's not like you can lose your job, so why do it?"

I then shared my perspective, that many people who get tenure love authority and that's what gets them through, and many of them have no ideas beyond the half a project that they milk to get beyond the line of permanent job security, so they face endless decades stretching out before them and they already love the system and they have very little true moral sensibility, so why not.

He then said something which another friend had said recently, that people who are tenured will put up with anything in order to attain a future where they can study what they study, even if that future is not all that it's cracked up to be when they get there, and that's part of why academic culture and academic outcomes are so bad.

"Can I say it?", he was like, dramatically. "The problem is tenure."

He then said that he thought recently about our conversation when the whole Avital Ronnell scandal was breaking out, that you get hazed by these people so you can enjoy the reward of seeking their approval and being in their company for the rest of your life, where you're in these little dinner parties with each other and everyone's that person, except outside of that circle, no-one really knows who you are, at least in academia.

"It's like this musician's Facebook post I read," he was like, and he said that it was this whole thread of comments from people who were on the verge of making it in this little musical subculture that he's a huge long-term fan of, and basically what everyone was saying was that they got far enough along in that world and they realized that it was a little clique of psychopaths who controlled everything, and they were like, "No, I don't want to be that, and I'm okay with making music for myself," and they just checked out from that whole subcultural rat race so they didn't have to become a monster.