New college town people (8 of 8): Bartender.

At the one brewery where I had gone and sat out on the patio on a nice early afternoon after I had first moved, and where I had learned that Tuesdays and Sundays tend to be the super slow days with sometimes only like eleven sales the entire day, I went in on a Tuesday evening since it's a huge warehouse space with tons of room and high ceilings and the few people I had seen there inside were very conscientious with masks, with the bartender wearing them and the customers putting them on when they were moving around the room and not sitting at their seats.

So, it seemed safe enough to go try and sit inside, at least now while it's low Covid and I'm not working with the elderly yet.

So, I went there and was reading some books at the end of the bar far away from all of the other people, and I started talking with the (young) (plaid flannel-shirted) (broad-faced) (knit-capped) (white) girl, and it turns out that she likes languages, too, and she was going to a small regional college for ASL before everything went to heck and she moved home because of Covid.

And, she's not in college right now, and she's not sure if and when she's going back, since she doesn't know what she wants to do, and I suggested maybe checking into speech therapy, and she said she actually had that in elementary school because she couldn't pronounce an "s" after a "th" and her kindergarten teacher noticed that and so she had three years of therapy, which kind of sucked, but the speech therapist also would give her M&Ms, and so all the other kids were jealous when she got up to leave and go there, since they saw the M&Ms, not how she had to read the same sentences and pages over and over for an hour each time, which could get kind of boring.

"That's kind of nice that they didn't stigmatize you," I was like.

"Yeah," she was like, "But I always felt bad because they made the only black kid go, because he talked, what do they call it now, AAVE."

And, she said that he was in the crime listing in the local paper recently and her mom showed it to her, and she felt bad, and she hates it when that happens.

I also talked with her more and she's hesitant about getting the booster shot because she's afraid of needles and she has to go take this other drug first to overcome her phobia of needles before she goes and gets the actual shot, but I explained to her some more about the omicron variant, and she agreed and said that she'd have to look into the booster right away.

And, she said that she suspects that she had Covid in February 2020, before everyone knew about the virus and that it was already circulating in the U.S.

"And don't judge me," she was like, "But I used to do a lot more drugs than I do now, and they have this saying that you can trip the sick away, and I think that's what happened to me," and she said that she felt totally like crap with stuff that she now recognizes as being like Covid systems, but she dropped some acid with her friends and all those symptoms just totally disappeared right afterwards, and that's the only time in her life that that's happened, but it did.

She also said that they keep the patio out front open all winter and I can always use that whenever I want, and that there's this trivia team who bundles up and goes and sits out there all the time, but it's not so much Covid, though they say it is, but it's so they can look at their phones out there and cheat.

New college town people (7 of 8): Bar customer.

In the college town that I now live in, there's several bars that are very spacious and empty, and so I've checked them out on early afternoons when they're first open and no-one is there, since Covid cases are low and I'm not working yet and so I can be slightly less neurotic than I have for the past 2 years.

And, at the one music one where a jam session was going on and there was a handful of customers spaced out, more people were coming in for the second act just as I was leaving, and this (sixty-something) (tight curly-haired) (white) woman moved with her friend over by me for the view right as I went to leave, and she asked what I was studying, and I told her, and then she asked what I worked in, and I told her, and it turns out that she's in healthcare too, and she teaches some classes at the local community college, and she told me that she doesn't believe in religion but she takes her inspiration from nature, and I told her about that recent scientifically-confirmed case of parthenogenesis in California condors, and she was like, "What's that?", and so I told her, and then she told me about this one case where a teenager came in with her mom just sobbing and was like, "But Mom, I didn't, I didn't!", and what do you know, her hymen was intact, and she also has taught sex ed in high schools, and young men's sperm is so strong, that one can actually climb its way all the way up your thighs and into your womb and get you pregnant, even if they don't put it in there, and so you know what that means, and all the kids were like, "Yes, Mrs. P!" (or a name like "Mrs. P"), "Don't have any sex unless you want to get pregnant!", and that's right, that can happen, and that's what she taught them.

Some bad weather was also coming in, and she told me about a snowplow that her ex-boyfriend from years ago used to have, and she pulled up some pictures of snow on her phone to show to me.

New college town people (6 of 8): Mall event space.

When I was getting all the necessary stuff to the framers to get that one print framed, I passed through the lobby of this small mall that's just off downtown, and it turns out that on that very day they were having some indoor arts-and-craft market, which mostly turned out to be printed clothing items and some homemade lotions stuff, and one CBD oil stalls where there was this one (late middle-aged) (very wrinkly) (white woman) with wild eyes, who was selling this huge array of little bottles of differently-flavored hard candies that she'd made, as well as some other CBD stuff that I can't remember.

And, she was talking to someone as I walked by, and all slowly and seriously and matter-of-factly I could overhear her saying, "...and then I smelled something, and I go check, and my cat's on fire, I don't leave stuff burning around, but I had a candle going on the floor and she went by and her tail caught on fire, and I can't have that, you just can't have that, the last thing I need is a cat on fire running around my house..."

New college town people (5 of 8): Gallery.

In the college town that I now live in, I was waiting for a bus to go drop off some couch cushions at an upholsterer way out on the edge of town, but the bus wasn't leaving quite yet for a half hour or so, so I popped into a second-floor art gallery like half a block up from the bus stop since a sidewalk signboard advertising it had caughten my eye, and so I ended up talking a lot with the (older) (grayer) (white) lady there, who I'm not sure was wearing a chunky-knit scarf, but definitely had that vibe, since she held down a second-floor art gallery in a college town.

And, right after we started talking, she said she'd be happy to sew my couch cushions for me and do those small cloth repairs, and I could go to an art shop and get foam and cut it myself and I could save a lot of money.

And, she also had some candy set out by the door, including a little ceramic mug full of Smarties, and when I was like, "If you don't mind, I'm going to get another one," and I told her that they hit the spot since I had actually woken up that morning with a craving for Bottle Caps, she was like, "Take them all," and she grabbed the mug and motioned it to me like I should dump it into my handbag.

"I need to sell the mug anyway," she was like.

And, we talked more, and it turns out that she was originally from the city that I had just left, and after mentioning the neighborhood that she grew up in and where her family moved to, I was like, "I'm sorry if this question sounds weird, but is your family Lithuanian Jewish?", since it sounded like (Lithuanian Jewish) biographies that I knew from working at the resthome.

And, her family was!

She also said that all three of her kids are in the city that I just left, and so I don't have to explain to her why I left. She says her daughter does television event production stuff, and so a lot of times she's out at different park buildings in worse neighborhoods, and for months now she calls her every time she's out someplace, when she's there and when she's back, since she wants to check in since she's afraid of getting carjacked. And, she never used to do that.

New college town people (4 of 8): Giftshop.

In the college town that I now live in, I popped into the coffee shop on the major street near me one weekend afternoon, and a door was open inside into the store next store, where they had a special Christmas shop set up for the weeks before Christmas, that was advertised as "now indoors" and was something like the second or third annual one.

And, the (younger) (big-boned) (round) (white) woman with a slight accent showed me around with some different items, and all of a sudden it clicked that she was probably (German) and was trying to reproduce the experience of a booth from an outdoor Christmas market like she had at home, and so I asked her what country she was from, and what do you know, she was indeed (German).

She got really into describing all of the items, too, like this one jam assembled by a local forager who likes to collect things from the local fields and forests and connect people to nature wasn't just only that, but the berry jam was also like standing in a misty forest on a cool morning, and going through and collecting berries and trying each one, in turn.

(I got the quince jam; it was soupy.)

I think people here don't have to work too much since it's so relatively cheap to live here, and so people are just kind of bored all the time and find ways to keep themselves occupied, which isn't necessarily opposed to the area attracting a certain number of eccentric creatives, too, not an overwhelming number, but a striking number, like enough where you notice.

Time moves so slowly here, it's wonderful.

New college town people (3 of 8): Museum.

On the way to the academic library in the college town that I now live in, to check out some books after getting my access card from there, I stopped through the campus museum to check out its hours and Covid protocols and also its ancient exhibits, since admission was free and it was on my way and the library that I was going to was open late that day.

And, the (college age) (somewhat skinny) (pleasant) (darker black) (twenty-something) (female) student at the front desk there said that at this time of year it's usually dead on weekdays, and she'd been there all afternoon and maybe three people had come in.

So, I went to check out the exhibits, which were a bit underwhelming apart from this one thing, and on the way out I hit the restroom and picked my stuff up from the locker room there and then said goodbye to her on my way out, as I got a squirt of hand sanitizer from the big bottle of hand sanitizer sitting on the desk in front of her.

"So," I was like, "Have you ever noticed the...?", and then I went on to describe this one palace tile that they had upstairs, that was tied to this one hugely pivotal civilizational moment from a major well-known ancient civilization all the way on the other side of the world, but that people don't necessarily appreciate or even really know about it.

"Yeah," she was like, "I have noticed that."

So, I briefly described the religious and cultural development a bit more, and you could tell that she was really into it, and then I was like, "And isn't it crazy that this sh*t is just sitting here in a museum in [area of the state that we're in], I know that that's how they used to do it, just go around and rip sh*t out of places and cart it off and give it to people, that was colonialism, but still, that's crazy, that this sh*t is just sitting up there all day and it's just like, there."

"Yeah," she was like, and she had like a slightly amused look on her face and chuckled a bit, like she was into it and agreed with me but I also kind of got her by articulating something that she automatically agreed with but had never really thought about before that much.

New college town people (2 of 8): Bank.

At the one local bank where I went to go set up a savings/checking account, they had some brochures with a cartoon tomato character on them advertising savings programs for children, and also like a three-foot cut-out of the same character sitting in the corner of the bank lobby, by a treasure chest of Christmas toys for children with handwritten instructions posted on it that you can take only one, and if you take more, you have to share it with your brother or sister.

So, after like forty-five minutes of setting up my accounts, the (white) (later middle-aged) (permed) bank lady asked me if I had any questions, so I said I did, and I quickly went through everything that we had just gone over, summarizing all the different steps that would be coming up (when my money would clear, when I'd get my debit card, etc.), and double-checking that I had understood everything correctly, which I did.

Then, after that, she was like, "Anything else?", again.

"Yeah," I was like. "Why is your children's mascot a tomato?"

"Oh," she was like, "Every spring we give people tomato plants, we're known for that."

. . .

(During the middle of the account process, a [middle-aged] [out-of-it] [scruffy] [black] guy came up to the teller window with a ten euro note, asking to cash it, and when they said they couldn't do it, asking to find out how much it was worth, and they told him, and he went away.)

New college town people (1 of 8): Framing shop.

At the framing shop where I was getting a print framed that the one resthome resident who wanted to die gave me so that I'd have something to remember her by, the one (older) (moustachioed) (white) worker helped me pick out a brown-ish paper edge and then a brownish-black wood that not only looked nice with it, but would also match my furniture.

Then, when I finally went and picked up the framing job llike a week later, the (younger) (vaguely stoner/hippie-ish) (very thin) (moustachioed and bearded) (white) guy worker said how nice it looked.

Then, he was like, "And you should have seen how it smelled."

And, after I said nothing, he was like, "It's walnut, walnut really smells when you cut it."

Weird window sight.

So, the window in front of my kitchen table in my new cottage looks right out into the yard, and for a while now there's been this weed stuck in the middle slat of the window pane that goes right across the middle of the window, like the top of a Queen's Anne Lace or something that has dried up and lost a lot of its branches, both the ancillary ones and the main ones.

The other day, then, I kept my blinds up longer than usual till it got dark out, and once when I glanced up while I was sitting there at the table, I saw that weed sticking there and it seriously freaked me out, when it gets darker out it looks much thicker than it actually is and so it looked exactly like a dried-up curled-up chicken claw just hanging there against the window, sitting there in the middle of space.

A text received this month...

...from my one (Ethiopian) coworker who's on the bigger side, who had moved to a different department but who I'd still see around the resthome a lot when I worked there:

Hi [my first name], how are you? How is new city right there, it is not easy all of a sudden you move from here, and it not easy we work together for long and now no [my first name] in [resthome name], I wish they call me if they did a a fair wel party, but no body remember me, any way have a good one [my first name]!! It's [her first name] your previous co-worker

. . .

Honestly, aren't so many of my coworkers and residents from the resthome the nicest? It's honestly one of the best jobs that I've ever had.

A dream of a fresh beginning for someone else.

The other week I dreamnt:

I was in the South visiting my one friend who does singing telegrams, and after I met some of her acquaintances on a college campus there, on a very pleasant mid-summer day that wasn't too hot at all, we ended up going to her designer flower shop and helping arrange these large-ish baskets that she had to get together to send out to some people, and with the baskets there was much glass around them and almost like fabric bottoms to them and much greenery inside, and they completely filled both of your arms, and the shop had high ceilings and white walls and pale yellow counters, and also there was these very large windows that looked out directly onto the campus green.

And then, I woke up.

. . .

(I had emailed her recently since I had lost my phone contacts a few months ago, but I hadn't heard back, so she had been on my mind.)

Miscellaneous small new experiences:

1) I've been consistently sleeping like eight-and-a-half or nine hours a night, which is a bit much for me; I wonder if my body is releasing all of the stress that I'd been keeping in from living in a deteriorating city.

2) Even though my new landlord told me to throw out all of the mail for the (previous) (evicted) tenant, I did open up some billing stuff that came in to make sure that it wouldn't be anything that he would need, and the letter ended up saying that he missed a psychiatric/psychological appointment sometime in mid-October.

3) The hurt in my back is slowly disappearing (probably because I'm not riding in to the subway to commute anymore? - the saddle of the replacement bike that I got after my previous bike was vandalized this summer was doing things to my back, I think, even though I'd ride it for just 5-10 minutes at a time to get to the subway stop and back).

4) When I went on a far bus route to go drop off some couch cushions to get reupholstered at a family owned business that's been around for decades and now seems to be run by a bro-ish son or two, I really got hammered with carsickness on the way back, I think because it was a small shuttle bus and not a regular large one, and it took all of these side roads and was always going on curves and starting and stopping, and on top of that I wasn't eye-level with the street and it had become dark and so my body couldn't easily look out the window and figure out what to expect with the way the bus was moving...  When I finally got home, I almost vomited when I stepped outside of the bus, and it took simply hours till I started feeling all right again.

5) When I went to go wash a bowl in the morning from eating the previous evening, there on the bottom of it lay a light dirty grey turnip-ish colored nub, that had an odd little dip on the top of it.  I couldn't figure out for the life of me what it was, but since it looked like a vegetable scrap, I put it in my mouth and bit into it a little, and I got a rather sharp-ish orange bite, and all of a sudden I realized that it was the navel scrap from an orange that I'd peeled the previous night, and when I went to go throw out all of the scraps, it must have fallen into the bowl in the sink and sat there and aged overnight and changed color a bit, from white to light grey, and that's why I didn't recognize it at first.

More reading the Bible (2 of 2): Ages and achievements.

In reading 1st Kings, it also struck me when I started getting into the divided dynasties for Israel and for Judah, how this one king was exactly my age, and like another one was a few years younger.

It's odd to think of someone your own age running a wartime polity in the Ancient Near East.

Like, how do you even manage?

Sh*t was crazy back then.

More reading the Bible (1 of 2): Deity names.

Reading the Bible can be so interesting.

The other week I was reading 1st Kings, and they mention "Chemosh the abomination of Moab" and "Molech the abomination of the Ammonites."

Who would worship a deity named "Chemosh" or "Molech"?

Even the names sound so foreboding, at least in (English).

Clear head.

So, a few days after I moved, I finally got around to sitting down to my first writing session in the college town that I moved to, to try to get some of my weekly writing hours in, not to mention start making up for the hours that I'd missed due to all of the stuff that I had to do to get ready to move and then actually go and move.

I honestly had my best writing day in like half a year, where I used an outline of a short op-ed that I'd previously made to whip up an entire rough draft, and then I engaged in some serious line-editing, all within the span of a very solid and very efficient and wonderfully pleasant two hours.

Before I moved, I had started wondering if there was something wrong with me, like my head was permanently foggy and I had a little cloud around my consciousness or whatever.

Now, I think it was just residual stress and the need to recover on my days off, from the way that the city I had been living in was deteriorating.

Evening out (2 of 2): Fresh perspective on parts of my life in recent years.

When I was out with my one (politics-careered) friend from college, his kids, and his girlfriend, I found out that his girlfriend used to be a political staffer, before she got sick of it and used the pandemic to make a long-overdue life move.

Interestingly, she's been increasingly sick of the growing number of influential nutjobs on both the left and the right, and she thinks that it's a huge problem that each party needs to clean up, though she doesn't know how they'll go about it.

When I also summed up my campaign of several years ago, including that I used my candidacy to get a political scandal in the press and that it eventually bore fruit and severely weakened the powerful incumbent, and that it cleared ground for redistricting to where it looks like he's not taken seriously and there might now be the creation of a long-overdue reboundaried district consolidating around a long-underrepresented ethnic minority, she was automatically like, "That's more than most elected officials can say they did in office."

Which, I think she meant honestly, and which I think is also true.

Just some credit more widely would be nice, for my accomplishments!

Evening out (1 of 2): Tennis.

The week before I moved, I ended up meeting a (politics-careered) friend from college, his elementary school-aged kids, and his girlfriend to catch up over a bit of food, before he took his kids to a professional wrestling event at an arena near me.

I arrived a bit early to the area so I could be ready to meet them whenever they arrived, and I ended up grabbing a beer at a (relatively empty) (black-owned?) (black-clienteled) pizza restaurant/bar a few blocks away from the arena.

There, while I was sitting at the end of the bar having my (overpriced) beer and studying this new-to-me form of script from the ancient language that I've been studying the past several years, I overheard a (younger) (black) guy way down the bar say something to the (vivacious) (skinny) (young) (black) (female) waitress about tennis, like she played tennis.

"So you play tennis?", I was like, when she was walking near me, and she was like, "Yeah."

"That's intimidating," I was like, "I could never do that." 

And, I explained that there was so much going on in tennis, from the serve to running around the court to having your racket at the right angle when you hit the ball, that it seems like "there's a ton of ways to mess up, and it's all on you."

"You're not wrong," she was like.

She also said that she plays at a court from a chain founded by this black celebrity and that she saw them at that location's opening, and she highly recommended that I go see the movie "King Richard," about Venus and Serena's dad and their early lives.

A strategy for moving:

Since the resthome got us a Thanksgiving turkey again this year, but there was no way for me to cook it up since I was moving, and since on top of that I was also working Thanksgiving this year, I ended up having to take it with me when I was moving.

I googled a lot and it seemed like it would be fine so long as it thawed as little as possible, so what I did was turn my freezer down to the lowest temperature, wrap it in like 4 t-shirts and put all that in a canvas bag, and then I put the whole thing in the freezer and kept it there for like days. And, it was the last thing out of my house, and the first thing to move in when I arrived.

Unfortunately, the fridge at my new place had been unplugged, so I had to plug it in and let the freezer cool down again before I could put the turkey in, but the trip was only like 3 hours and the day was cool and even on the verge of cold, so I just set the turkey outside on the concrete slab outside my new little cottage, and it sat there in the evening for like another forty-five minutes, and then finally when the freezer was cold enough, I unwrapped the turkey and fired it in.

And, when I unwrapped it, the turkey was still so frozen that it was hard as a rock to the touch, all over its surface.

I think that was a success!

An observation upon moving.

It turns out that the (shorter) (rounder) (late middle-aged) (white) woman who sold me my yearly bus pass is a cost-of-living refugee from Austin, Texas.

She's a Texas native and had lived in Austin for just years, but she finally moved three years ago, when rents were getting to be too much. She said that the small 2BR she had was just okay, but they were actually going to raise the rent up to $1500, and that was too much, and her best friend lives in the college town we're in because of their spouse's job, and they invited her up to come check it out, and so she did, and she moved.

I told this by text to one of the profs who ended up serving on my dissertation committee, who lives in Austin, and she said that the rent problem is actually even worse now.

I also just came across an article that the city I had lived in has been experiencing net population loss, but the county I moved to has been experiencing net population growth.

I totally get that. If you're not set up with money and it's increasingly hard to make ends meet in a city, why wouldn't you move to someplace like I am now?

It's really astonishing to me what major economic changes have taken place across the past ten to twelve years or so; just great swathes of existence simply aren't comparable, from professional sectors to livable places.

A note upon moving...

 ...from the one resthome resident who's a retired school nurse:

[my first name] -

Thank you for the gift of time to me.

The future is yours. Good luck.

[her first name]

. . .

(She also slipped in like fifty bucks, probably as a thank-you for this extra walking escort thing that I would always try to do with her whenever I was on shift, even when she wasn't assigned to me, which was most of the time lately, like at least for the past half year.)

A perspective on moving:

I was texting my one former assisted living client's (lesbian) sister about how time seems to move slower in the college town that I live in, and she totally agreed about that.

I also was saying that the city had been good for many things for many years, but lately it had been rush rush rush, and when I look back, I have absolutely no idea, what was that good for?

"Stress," she was like, texting. "It was good for stress hormones."

A thought on moving:

How horrible would it be to be a nomad, having to pack up and move all the time?

Two omens, before moving:

1) Like a month before moving, the laundromat near me burned down, with the entire building gone.

2) The week before moving, I heard that the (short) (weirdly-eyed) (dark black) (soft-voiced) (foreign-accented) (homeless) guy who you'd see around the street leading to the resthome, and who would stand in traffic lanes a bit south of there staggering around asking money of cars and even bicyclists who passed by, and who my one (former) (older) (white) (gay) resthome coworker said lacked fingers on one or maybe both hands, the week before moving, I heard that he got struck by a car early in the morning, at that busy intersection. They had posters up near there saying that he had died, but then it turns out that he was just in critical condition, so someone went through with a pen and added phrases like "He lives!" on there, to show people that he was still alive.

Three omens, upon moving:

1) I find a classical radio station, and the piece that I'm listening to and sounds vaguely familiar ends, and it turns out to be Wagner's overture to "Rienzi," which I had just heard a few days earlier back in the city that I used to live in.

(It turns out that the station that I had tuned into was broadcasting the exact same syndicated radio show that I had heard just a few days earlier, back on the classical radio station that I used to listen to in the city that I used to live in!)

2) Two volumes with the world's oldest papyri were already sitting there at my new apartment waiting for me when I arrived with my U-Haul (I had ordered them a few weeks earlier, but I had assumed that shipping from Cairo would be much slower than it was).

3) In a not-good omen, on my first trip to the grocery store near me, my receipt for like $90 worth of groceries indicated that I had enjoyed exactly $6.66 in savings.

Resthome CPR training.

Before I left the resthome, I had to undergo my every-two-years CPR refresher.

There was like twenty of us from all different divisions of the resthome, and like 85% of them were women and most of everyone was (foreign born), so when I looked around the room right before I sat down, I was like, "Of course I love this line of work." 

One of the first steps in CPR is to first tap the person to check if they're actually awake and okay, so when people were going up to the front of the room to tap the dummy and be like, "Are you okay, are you okay," a few times someone would put on a voice and be like, "Yes I am" or "No I am not," and then everyone would burst out laughing.

The instructor also cued up the Bee Gees' "Staying Alive" on her phone when people were practicing on the dummy since it has a beats-per-minute that roughly matches how often you should do compressions, only, the first time that she cued it up, she didn't say what was happening, and this whole row of (older) (filipinas) started doing disco moves with their arms as they were just sitting in their seats around the table.

The instructor also had this really good tip; she said that if you had to move around or hold up breasts or large rolls of fat in order to place defibrillator pads, it's good to remember that you can always use your forearm instead of your hands and fingers, since that depersonalizes the interaction (which might be more a matter of consideration for onlookers than the CPR person themself, since presumably they'd be unconscious at that point, though I'm assuming this applies to other non-CPR interactions as well).

Two variations on an exchange at the resthome.

Before I left the resthome, the one resident who moves slowly started saying something like "You're getting everything!" when I'd ask her for her bracelets and glasses at the end of the night when I started her getting ready for bed.

So, once I was then like, "So, can I have your wallet and credit cards?", which she found hilarious.

Then, a time or two later, I was then like, "So, can I have your number? Wink wink wink," which she also found hilarious.

A mystery of my aching balls.

So, like a month or so ago I pulled my back, and then like three or four days into that, my balls really started aching, too, especially the (larger) (right) one.

I first started thinking that maybe it was some testicular cancer or something, and then I thought that maybe it was a weird nerve thing involving my back, and then my one (white) (townie) coworker at the resthome said that maybe it was a UTI, since "guys get them too," and that got me thinking that maybe it really was a UTI from my taking a few baths a few nights in a row to soak my back in hot water and make it feel better, since maybe while I was laying there a long time in the hot water it came up my dick and did something all up in there.

Then, like the next day, I started doing my stretching exercises that I had been doing a lot of to help loosen up my back and make it feel it better, and when I knelt with my knees tight together and leaned forward to lay over the front of my knees and feel my back muscles and vertebra get all loose, I suddenly felt my balls ache, especially the (larger) (right) one, and then I suddenly realized that my yoga pose was making me lean on and crush my balls.

So, I kind of repositioned with my legs apart so my balls could sag down and I wouldn't be crushing them, and I kept doing that,, and after a day or so without that they began feeling normal again.

Problem solved!

Feats of cleaning out my kitchen...

...before my move this past week:

- Using the last of the (Turkish) coffee from this tin that's been sitting in my refrigerator forever.

- Sloshing some water around in some old plastic mustard bottles and then adding that in to some barley soup that I was cooking.

- Cooking up eggs in bacon fat, and also cooking up scrambled eggs with onion and cabbage sauteed in sesame seed oil. 

- Putting a small pack of powdered sugar into milk that I was heating up to make oatmeal with.

All in all, it's amazing how much stuff like that really clears out your pantry shelves, and gets you down to "zero" for a clean slate before a move. I have so much less stuff to take with me now, from my pantry.

A question about the Tibetan language:

Does it make gender distinctions in 3rd person pronouns, or does it just lump he/she/it together?

A few weeks ago at the resthome, my one (blocky-built) (older) (Tibetan) coworker was like "Ask her" about maybe getting them Coca-Cola when a (bed-ridden) (male) resident sent an end-of-shift call down for me to come up for assistance, since that (man) likes Coca-Cola and sometimes wants sips of it at night.

I'm thinking that maybe my coworker's mistake in pronouns goes back to some distinction that they don't make in Tibetan, which is why she said "her" about someone who's obviously a man. For someone with gender distinctions in pronouns, that's a very unnatural mistake to make, and my hunch is that it may go back to something in her mother tongue.

A story of crime in the city...

...told to me by a (white) (retired police officer) who owns a hardware store in the city a few blocks away from my house.

Like around the beginning of last month, his wife was working alone in the store, and this agitated guy came in looking around at stuff in the aisles, and then he came up to the counter and asked her if they had pepper spray, and she didn't think so and said no, but the guy saw some up on a hook behind her and pointed it out to her and asked her to open it up for him, and at that point she knew that he was going to try to use it to rob her.

And, the (white) (retired police officer) happened to be at home and have a sixth sense around that time, so he called his wife at the store to check in on her, and she asked him to bring her a cup of coffee, and since she doesn't drink coffee, right away he knew that something was wrong, and he was like, "Don't worry, someone will be there right away," and he hung up and called some people he knew who were right there close by, and they immediately rushed on over.

And, they began to hang around and chat, and the guy kind of looked around and headed out, and they've never seen him before or since.

And, after that they closed the shop for 2 weeks, and they've decided that she'll never work alone again there.

He says he wants to move, maybe to Florida or Arizona or something, but his wife is a city girl, and she has family by them that she sees pretty much every day, so that doesn't seem like it will be happening, but still.

He says that they don't need money from the store but it's just something that they do in a property that they own, so it really doesn't hurt them to close for two weeks like that, but still.

A dream of something wrong: Bicycle and bus.

The other week about a month or so ago I dreamnt:

I'm bicycling by this early springtime town square that's in the northeast, and it's growing dark and I'm growing tired and I think I should hop on a bus soon and put my bike up front and use that to go home, and all of a sudden I see there's a bus a bit ahead and stopped at a bus stop, but as I try to speed towards it, the light changes and it takes off, and it does this several times along the last bit of road headed into the town square and along two sides of the town square, and then finally on this long road heading out of town. There, I finally think I'm about to catch it, on this stretch that borders a big hill coming down, at a time of day where it feels like early afternoon though I had not noticed any change in time, but then it shoots ahead and goes up a dogleg that starts to go up the hill, and I know that I've finally lost it for good.

And then, I wake up.

. . .

Some thoughts on reading Chronicles.

So many names, of people who are long dead, and so often the only thing that we can know is their name.

So odd.

Also, it must be tough to have OCD and attempt to read the entire Bible, since your eyes probably glaze over during genealogies, and maybe you would always wonder if you had skipped something, even a single syllable or a single letter in an odd foreign name, and so maybe you would force yourself to read sections and even whole books back again from the beginning.

Also also, of several people I know who have claimed to read the entire Bible - including my one (lawyer) friend from (Missouri) - I need to ask them how they treated the long genealogy parts.  Like, did they really read all of that?  I'm not sure they did.

A fun alternative to a bottle of wine:

The other week when I had to go in to work and then afterwards I caught up with my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair) and my one (lawyer) friend from (Missouri), instead of bringing each of them a bottle of wine like I usually do, instead I got them 2 rice balls and a selection of savory buns from the bakery that's on my way to work that I'm a huge fan of.

It cost around the same as a bottle of wine, but it was a little something different, and a lot more fun!

It also patronized a local business.

I had two little white cardboard boxes, each with an identical selection.

Both of my friends appreciated them, to tell the truth.

An odd resthome fact:

In the little free library that's out in front of the resthome, though all of my other weird and esoteric and scholarly books have regularly been taken from there relatively quickly, the one grammar of a rare-ish dead language that I studied in college has just sat there, for like a week.

No-one who walks by must want it!

Two random events...

...when I went to go hang out with my one (lawyer) friend from (Missouri) the other week:

1) Her stereo kicked up some of the Cat Stevens album where I had recently been at home and opened my CD case of that album, only to find that it was missing.

2) I was in her bathroom and I swore I smelled an IPA, only I took my mask down, and I realized that it had been the grapefruit candle that she had been burning in there.

A day at the resthome:

1) The one (aging) (white) (gay) (Midwestern) front desk worker said that his neighbor told him that the other week him and his spouse took the subway here in the city to go downtown like around 6pm at night, and there was a guy on there holding up a big like cigar lighter all aflame, and he was saying that he was going to hurt and kill all the white people, and by the time that they were a few stops away from downtown, the police came on the train and hauled him off.

2) My one (blocky built) (Tibetan) coworker noted that the office has so many pens now, and I told her that I found them when I was cleaning out my apartment, and I put them in a big envelope and brought them all in.

3) When I got back from taking a resident to a weekly medical appointment like I usually do, I radioed on to my other coworkers to let them know that I was back like I usually do, only, this time my one (Tibetan) coworker with an inappropriate sense of humor radioed on and was like, "Welcome back, [my first name]."

Interesting resthome political discovery:

So, it turns out that my one (Chinese-heritage) (Filipina) coworker follows news stories around the Chinese government and their ambitions, and she's very, very wary of them.

The other week, she asked me if I had heard how they were asking citizens to stock up on food.

She also was saying that she always wanted to visit Hong Kong and maybe even work there, but not any more, and now she wouldn't set foot in it.

I was telling her that their cyber-censorship and censorship of artists freaked me out, and how they've started doing anti-gay stuff and solidifying a personality cult around their leader, and how they have their social media apps where they can go in and monitor what people are doing.

"Of course they do," she was like.

I said that it was a mistake to ship U.S. manufacturing to China, not because all trade with other countries is bad, but because you're giving them more power over us, and you could tell right away from the way she looked that she didn't disagree.

Interesting discovery at a recent academic conference:

In a post-conference casual beers-and-chat session, it turned out that the one (now tenured) conference organizer wrote up a complaint and submitted it to her Ph.D.-granting institution about a professor there who pressured at least one advisee into an inappropriate work situation, since they wanted there to be a paper trail of it.

It seems to me that these complaints must be getting more common; there's less social tolerance overall for abuses like that, and since jobs are less certain than ever, although some people might shy away from that kind of thing even more than previously, others are like, "What do I really have to lose?", and go ahead and put into writing the secrets that everyone knows.

It seems also that that professor had expected their also-in-academia spouse to get the job, whereas they were the one that somehow found traction, and so maybe that's why they went ahead and did that.

Odd experience around a recent academic conference:

Two apparently successful (tenured) profs were very dissatisfied with their work, with one thinking of moving into admin so that they could have a more limited workweek, and the other one thinking back to their days at an editing job and wondering when they could have weekends off again.

Also, somewhat oddly, the one suggested I get a 2nd Ph.D. in the area, and the other one asked me why I wasn't a professor (a question that came up from someone else at the conference, too, after my very successful research presentation).

The latter one was very nice but they even seemed a bit jealous that I had control of my workweek and could do what I want, and they mentioned how in the country that they came from, the poor economy was forcing people around our age to rediscover the joys of simple jobs like with the elderly and in farming (with the organic movement also helping the farming path along).

Overall, when I was around the academics, I found myself self-censoring, to avoid saying that I keep a 16 hour-a-week research-and-writing regimen.  My hunch is that that's more than most of them can keep up, and why go around and spark unnecessary jealousies.

Food (2 of 2): Feeding me.

A few weeks ago I was doing a lot of cooking using up random stuff around the house, like thawing and then baking some frozen tilapia fillets, and opening up a can of tomato puree to add in some stuff and make a spaghetti sauce out of it, and using a can of condensed milk with some water added in in order to make up this (hispanic) mango jello-like dessert thing that I had bought out of curiosity a few months ago at the local supermarket near me.

And, apart from some old Popeye's ketchup packets that I was going to squeeze out into the spaghetti sauce but turned out to be kind of blackish-red and dehydrated and so I threw them out, all of that food was some stuff that the one (lesbian) sister of my one assisted living client gave me as stuff that she had that she wasn't going to use, and I actually texted her that I was finally making the fish, and I had never actually cooked fish before.

It was super good, too. I had a couple of spare limes in the fridge, so I googled lime recipes with tilapia and I ended up using a drizzle of peanut oil, the juice of two limes, some chili powder, some cumin, and some fresh chopped garlic, and I rubbed it on all of the fillets, before I baked it in my oven.

It turned out surprisingly good! 

Since my microwave broke a while ago, I just spray a frying pan with Pam - another gift from the (lesbian) sister! - and just reheat the tilapia fillets on there, too, which works well enough.

Food (1 of 2): Inadvertent resthome influence.

A few weeks ago I really wanted to eat something sweet but I really didn't have much around the house, so I cut up some apples and drizzled some honey on them, which was kind of like rosh hashanah.

Then, like that day or the next, I was going to toast some cinnamon raisin bread, but I was so hungry, that I actually tore a little bit of the crust off of the top as I put it into the toaster, and as I stood there and looked at it, suddenly I realized that it was like people tearing the crust off of challah on shabbat.

App discovery.

When I block the ability to use the internet on my smartphone on some of my days off, I always set so many hours or so in order to have it free up again around 9pm or so.

But, the other week, it freed up around 8pm, which I found very odd.

Then, I realized that it was because of daylight savings, which must have interacted with the app somehow, where the app didn't take it into account (or it did take it into account, where our time fell back and so what had been 9pm was suddenly 8pm? - I can never keep daylight savings time straight, or conversions across timezones).

Resthome mystery.

Last month at the resthome, I was wheeling the one resident who used to be a building contractor back to his room after dinner, and right when we get to his door, it slowly creaks back and opens up against the wall, like it was slightly loose on its hinges and had coincidentally just started to open then, right when we got there.

"That's funny," the one resident was like, "I wonder if somebody did that."

Then, we get inside, and though the door is really close against the wall, we look, and there's my one (Tibetan) coworker with an inappropriate sense of humor, wedged in behind the door, and silently snickering to herself.

. . .

(She must have gone around to check on him to give him his medications, checked in to see if he was in his bedroom, and then gone to go back out and heard us coming, and so decided to prank us.)

One of the handful of worst subway rides I'd ever had in the city...

...which I had a few Friday nights ago:

1) An out-of-it (young) (trans?) (person-of-color?) strolls down the car, asks for a light, and smokes a cigarette while standing and staring into the next car, then later starts talking to themself and softly moaning and laying down on the seat and splaying their legs out, and then getting up and jumping around on the bars, at one point like it's a stripper pole.

2) Later, for the second half of the ride, a (crazed) (maskless) (middle aged-ish) (black) guy comes down the car stopping a foot-and-a-half from everyone's faces and asking them for money, then he gets to the front of the car and he can't go any further since it's the conductor's car, so he asks me if it's okay if he sits across from me, so I mumble something affirmatively, and there he sits for the rest of the ride, occasionally twitching really hard and shouting something random out to people down the car, as I hold my pepper spray kind of behind my backpack on my lap just out of his sightline.

3) After I get off of the train and get on my bike to go home, I round the corner by a bar and there's a lot of cars idling outside so I ride on the sidewalk, and suddenly I realize that the (young) (white) guy crossing the street towards my direction is not a customer leaving the place, but rather this seriously crazy young guy who probably has mental disabilities and substance abuse problems and who's been around the neighborhood but I haven't seen him in a good three years, and out of nowhere he starts running towards me on my bike, so I start peddling really fast and I jet past him as he's like two-and-a-half or three feet from getting me, and I keep going, and then in twenty feet I glance back and he had stopped right then and there when it was clear he couldn't lurch at me successfully, and he was just kind of standing there.

A conversation with a few folks downtown.

Like a few weeks ago at the main library downtown when I had gone in to use some microfilm for some research that I'm doing, I ended up talking with some of the librarians in there for a while, and the one said that people are losing it, and that they don't see it in more homeless people coming into the library every day, although there was a lady screaming the other day and guards had to go and take her out, and she said she had a gun, but more on public transportation, like how the other week there was this guy just on the train throwing popcorn everywhere, and a year ago someone threw himself on the tracks just when everyone was leaving work, and the one said that she works nights at a different job, and she has for years, and that now you can see people sleeping out more in places that you never saw them before.

And, afterwards, I went to go get a frigid patio beer at the one bar I like that's nearby there, and I bumped into someone from my neighborhood who's a building engineer and who works nearby and who is super nice when I went inside to order, and I talked to him a bit, and he said that his coworker stopped taking the subway in a month ago after there was a gunfire incident early morning in one station, and that he himself drives his wife everywhere now, even though she grew up in the Bronx when it wasn't that good and she isn't dumb about anything, but still, you never know.

A dream of things going somewhat wrong.

The other week I dreamnt -

I'm carrying four huge cartons of Edy's ice cream in my arms, and I'm in the back hallway in the resthome by the giftshop, and sometimes I'm talking with the one nice lady who comes in as a volunteer and runs the giftshop, but at other times the lid of one or two of the ice cream cartons is off, and somehow I'm holding them all but also sampling a bit of the ice cream at the same time, occasionally, and, the one is white but has some chunks in it and is oddly sweet, but in a way that is not unpleasant, but it's melting all around the edges from my body heat as I'm holding it, and that's the soupy part where I'm sampling it from, and I think I'll be fine bringing all of the ice cream home and putting it in the freezer in time, but at the same time, I know that I'm not 100% sure about that, and I'm not sure that it really will be fine and salvageable.

And then, I wake up.

. . .

Resthome exchange.

The other week at the resthome I bumped into the one resident who sings in the elevator, as she was all dressed up very nicely and on her way to pre-dinner religious services, in a wheelchair that my one (Mexican) coworker was pushing.

"Hi [the resident's first name]," I was like. "You look very elegant today."

At that, she just looked at me, then raised a finger and pointed it behind her at my one (Mexican) coworker.

"It was her idea," she was like.

A child, on my name.

A few months ago when I went to go hang out with my one (half Sudanese) (half British) friend, her (American) husband, her new baby, and her young daughter, she had told her daughter the day before that "[my name]" would be visiting, and right away her daughter was like, "You mean [my name] from the book?", since, as it turns out, her favorite book is about this little boy who's always breaking all the rules, in ways that are lavishly illustrated.

(Her dad, my friend's [American] husband, totally thinks that the appeal is looking at another child violate all the rules.)

So, my friend was like, "No, the real [my name] is coming!", and after that, her daughter was always like, "When is the real [my name] coming?"

Anyhow, we all hung out and her daughter showed me her little book, and I read the short sentences on each page to her and told her that I hoped that she never behaved like that.

"He's naughty," she would be like, and, oddly enough, when she said that, the main vowel in the word "naughty" was pronounced like the (British) do, but only that one vowel.

It was very odd to hear the first few times, but it was total child language acquisition in action, where her brain was presented with variants in the speech around her and she subconsciously selected one to incorporate into the way she talks.

I basically have read that over a few generations that's like how Australia happened, and New Zealand too, and there it was in front of me.

Back story to a cookie.

So, I made sure to majorly thank the one (older) resident who likes purple, for those wonderful Lotus Biscoff cookies that she gave me the other week.

And, I asked her a bit more about her husband's love of them.

She said that he served in the war in Belgium, but he didn't try them then, but only afterwards, and for years they'd buy them whenever they'd come across them, but you can get them at Costco now, where they actually happen to be on sale, do you ever go to Costco.

Business cards, and a bonfire.

During my cleaning, I also uncovered business cards, that I sometimes set aside, because sometimes I think I'd like to revive the memories of whoever was in there.

So, I slipped them into my most recent envelope, like I've kept for simply years now; I take a manilla envelope and slip ephemera in there and mark the date on the outside of when I started that, and then eventually it fills up and I tape the top and mark on the outside when it finished, and then I go and start up a new envelope.

And, I have a small taped-up box full of a number of these envelopes, and like maybe 3-5 other more recent ones that were in my big office supplies bin that I keep a lot of random stuff in that I access fairly frequently, like the logbook where I've been listing for years now all of the books that I read for recreation, with rough start and finish dates, if I don't mess those up.

Lately I've been thinking that before I move, I'd like to open up all of the envelopes and spend some time with whatever's in there; maybe see some stuff, have a memory and its fullness, and set aside the truly essential in new envelopes, maybe to look at again one day.

And, the rest, I'd like to have a bonfire of, a bonfire of me. Just things that have been there and served their time, and that I've now seen again, and that I'm ready to set free into the past.

Somehow this just seems right.

Another find.

A notebook of background interviews, when I was doing what turned out to be my first successful financial expose.

Again, just a glimpse of me, then.

That was like the 2nd or 3rd to the last item in the last box on my back porch.

Circles in life.

I've often heard it said that there aren't circles in life, but more spirals, where you come back around to where you were, but on a new level.

I finally cleaned my apartment top-to-bottom, and it was interesting to finally come to the last boxes that I hadn't opened in years, the ones that I kept in a small pile on my back indoor porch.

The very last one had some binders with linguistics stuff from college that I had tucked away, that I had thought years ago that I might get rid of, but then realized that they might be useful some day, somehow, in a way that I couldn't quite put my finger on.

And, interestingly enough, they are now, since recently I've been realizing that the ancient language I'm studying could benefit from a better form of education like I had in my undergraduate language classes.

And, there was a binder with this one weird ancient religion I once took a class on during my master's, where I saved all the material because I felt that there was something there, compared to some other stuff where it was clear that I could dispose of it.

And, interestingly enough, I now realize that there might be something interesting tucked away in that religion, about conceptualization of revelation, and it's actually tied into stuff that I've been thinking about now for a number of years, but after I had had that class, and certainly not during the time that I was taking it.

I also found a few small notebooks, and this list of when I started an ultimately successful secret unionization drive, where I was like "Fuck this" and started gaming out numbers for a potential bargaining unit and had done initial recon on who was tucked away where, organizationally. It was the very last thing I looked at, and it was just so intense and driven and "Fuck you" fuck-with-the-system in a way that I haven't been for a few years now, and it was interesting to see this glimpse of my past self, and not necessarily in a way that I disliked it, in fact I admired it and I tucked the notebook away in my files, just like a friend told me I definitely should, but at the same time I've been kind of firmly getting away from that in what I've been getting into of late, and I don't really feel a need now to go back into that headspace and just that sheer drive that I see in it. It's just the past.

John Nepomucene.

There's this one old (Catholic) church building in my neighborhood that has "John Nepomucene" engraved on the front of it, and the other week when I was riding on a train on a long-distance train trip, I passed by some church building that said "John Nepomuk" on the front of it, and all of a sudden I connected the two, as well as realized that that must also be the middle name of this one composer "Johann Nepomuk Hummel" who I hear about on the radio all the time, on this one classical music station that I listen to.

Visceral exclamation of a resthome resident who never swears...

...when I informed her the other day of a situation in the city where there was vigilante justice against a mentally ill homeless person who began assaulting a college-age woman on a subway car:

"Jesus Christ!"

(And that was an automatic response, and she never swears.)

Crying (2 of 2): An errand in the city.

A few days ago I gathered up all of the electronics and whatnot that I had been setting aside for years to go take away to electronics recycling - a few dead laptops and a few dead phones and a lot of cords and some dead batteries and whatnot, all of which feels so good to go and get out of my house - and then the next day before work I got up really early and I went to go drop them off at this one computer repair store in a yuppie neighborhood on my way to work that I've patronized before and that does all that as a favor for people.

But, after I had hopped off at this one subway stop and was walking up to the computer store, suddenly there were all of these people on the sidewalk, and I look again, and it's all of these parents and all of these very young children, white and blonde and in sort of expensive early winter gear just standing out in huge clusters along the edge of this one glass facade built into a building, and I see a clinic sign there, and I suddenly realize that they're all waiting in line to get the vaccine that's now available for the children, now.

And, I remember that we're still in the pandemic that I've been trying to be surviving, and it's like I let my guard down, and I could suddenly maybe feel that maybe this could be more over soon, and I just started crying some, but just a little, since I was forced to stop and look at everything that we've been experiencing, which you usually just don't do since you're in the middle of it, and we have been for months and months and months, for well over a year and a half now.

Crying (1 of 2): Visit with my parents.

Last month when I met my parents for a visit in this one college town in my homestate - that made the most sense to meet in terms of Covid precautions and whatnot - the first full day that we were there, we went to an archaeological museum, and after we had done that all day with a break for lunch, we took a meandering walk back towards downtown and the hotel, and my mom and I sat to stop and rest while my dad stepped off to go have a smoke.

And, my mother started talking about how when I was a high school senior I got a full ride to that school, and how they called me up to ask me what I wanted to go there, and all of these little details from way back then, many of which I had forgotten, and all of which were already more than two decades and more than half my life ago, and it was just like she was re-living and dwelling in that small thing from so long ago, and she was fully lost to the present.

And, I started crying, since she suddenly seemed so old.

Weird reaction to reading the Bible.

So, I’ve been keeping on reading the Bible in order to read all of it, and I’m in 1^st Samuel now.

Maybe it’s because of different life experiences that I’ve had, but I keep wondering what the people were really like, who underlie all of these traditions.

Like, was David a narcissist?

The whole taking over from Saul thing, getting people on his side, it kind of seems a little like the good parts of narcissism that get people swept up in them, it seems to me now, from what I know of life.

Another overheard interchange at the resthome…

…when I saw my one (Nigerian) coworker bump into a(n African-American) caregiver who was just getting on shift:

“It’s been a long time,” he was like, immediately after they both said hello.

. . .

(I noticed that he said this to me a few months ago, after a period where I hadn’t seen him in a while – perhaps he’s translating into English some Nigerian greeting custom, maybe something from Yoruba?)

An overheard interchange at the resthome…

…when I was escorting the one resident who moves slowly and for some reason something surprised her and she said the word “Jesus!” several times in a row as we were walking past a(n Africana) worker from upstairs who happened to be right there in that same hallway waiting in line for a Covid test:

The resident (surprised): “Jesus!”

The (Africana) worker from upstairs (quickly): “is Lord.”

The resident (surprised): “Jesus!”

The (Africana) worker from upstairs (quickly) “is Lord.”