Cat antics.

Last month, me and my one assisted living client with disabilities were talking about her sister's cat, and she said that one day she was in the bathroom and had wheeled up to the sink to go wash her hands, and after she had hauled herself up and had washed her hands and was going to go sit down again, there her sister's cat was, just sitting on the wheelchair that she had just gotten out of.

"All right, if that's what you want!", she said she said, and she said she sat down again but on the lip of the wheelchair seat, with the cat sitting behind her in the little area between her back and the back of the wheelchair.

"How did he get out?", I was like, and she said that at some point when she was wheeling around he just hopped out over one of the armrests.

Public transportation realization.

After 4 horrid rides in a row on public transportation this past week or so, I suddenly had a realization:

Between delays for construction and the increased number of severely mentally ill people on the trains - and that stuff is not necessarily separable, since if trains are delayed or way too staggered, there's more people crammed onto the next train that does come and so you're more likely to come across multiple severely mentally ill people on just one ride! - I might be spending up to 1.5 hours a day in close quarters with people who are severely mentally ill, who are engaging in unpredictable and sometimes aggressive behavior.

(Forty-five minutes to work, and forty-five minutes back, including waits on the platform.)

No wonder I can sometimes be getting f*cking on edge, from riding public transportation.

When I planned where I lived and my work commute, with safety and commute times and apartment prices and whatnot, I just didn't plan for this, and I just didn't sign up for this sh*t.

It's really whack.

At its worst, it's like you're in the lobby of a mental health clinic, tense and on the lookout for who's coming in and what they'll do.

Useful phrase:

"Rich man's game."

The other week I popped into the printshop that had done printing for my campaign and the owner and her sister were there, and they were very complimentary about the scandal on the incumbent that I had gotten into the paper, and the sister was asking me if I'd run again, and I said that I was leaning against it, and though some major reasons remained, I think I'd be happier doing what I'm doing now, and that anyways barriers to that form of public service are just too high if you don't come from a higher socioeconomic status with your profession or your family background or whatever, or have a wealthy patron like some big union that's fronting you money.

"It's a rich man's game," the sister was like, grimacing.

Very true - and very much like academia, too.

Hustle and talent just don't compensate as much as you'd think for wealth and patronage, at least nowadays, and at least in the many domains that I've been active in in my adult life.

Lives of the tenured.

Just this week, I've seen 3 very negative posts on social media by people around my age or just a little older who are tenured in academia.

One is a guy I know vaguely from college, who was saying on Facebook that he's never worked so hard as he has this past year, and he would like to leave, but he doesn't have the money.

 (He has a spouse and children, so my hunch is that that's a big factor, too.)

And, this other prof who's a bit older and who's apparently tenured at a flagship state university replied and said something like, "I want to take early retirement as early as possible, but I won't have the money to do that, either."

And, like a day or two later, some prof I follow on Twitter said he got tenure a few months ago, but was leaving academia for a job in another sector, and was thinking of writing a tell-all article about his institution.

 (His Twitter account was closed to the public, so I assume that I started following him for some reason, and then at some point he closed down his account and started saying what he really thinks.)

Anyhow, it's honestly like so many people are honestly done or just bailing.

Just not a healthy sector.

Two experimental breads.

Like the past couple of years, I've tended to keep a loaf of cheap raisin bread in my freezer so that I can toast a slice or two and have it warm with butter as a treat snack whenever I want to.

Only lately, the grocery store that I go to in my neighborhood doesn't carry the same raisin bread brand that I've been getting.

So, I ended up getting this expensive raisin cinnamon bread brand for a time or two (the $4 a loaf kind, versus the $1.99 kind that I'd been getting, where the bread fluff was almost like a cheap, starchy white bread).

But, the last time I went in to the store, a few other bread brands caught my eye, and I came away with a maple bread and an apple bread.

It wasn't until later when I had them in my freezer that I realized that I'd splurged on two experimental breads, and I didn't have a predictable cinnamon raisin bread to fall back on as a snack.

As it turns out, the maple bread brand tastes like a cheap pancake maple syrup, while the apple bread brand tastes like a cheap apple flavor that appears evenly throughout the entire bread slice, and not contained into the little apple chunks that you can find sometimes in some apple bread brands.

Catching up with a (Ukrainian) acquaintance.

The other week I caught up with a (Ukrainian) acquaintance who was back in town.

We had been in touch a bit on Facebook, but otherwise I hadn't seen him in like 7 or 8 years.

In the interim, he was married for 3 years to a woman he met on an ashram.

He also was living in New York City and Kiev and was getting a bit into rooftop parties with swingers and orgies, and he dated a(n Indian) girl who turned out to be trans*, he got it from the wrist and the voice after meeting her a few times.

"Did she have a shallow vagina?", I was like.

"No, she didn't have the surgery," he was like.

"So how did you like, you know?", I was like.

He then said that two times he fucked her in the ass, before he realized that he wasn't really into it.

He also said he's a big fan of online learning, and thinks it will largely replace the regular college classroom.

Four people on the subway the other day:

 1) A (younger) (middle-aged) (black) guy who is cleanly dressed but walks on and seems to be trying to strike up a conversation with someone he doesn't know, and then sits down and asks the lady across from him "What's English for 'hello'?", and then after being like, "I'm just kidding with you," "What do you call a fly with no wings?" (answer: "a walk").

2) A (very dark-skinned) (late middle-aged) (pot-bellied) (black) woman with her belly sticking out of her (bright turquoise) shirt that matches her jogging pants, who staggers onto the train drinking out of a huge plastic orange juice bottle, who goes to sit down near where the woman who the guy had been talking to was, and then when he starts talking to her is all loudly like, "No, why are you talking to me, I don't know you," and she sits down all crazy, and then when she gets up to leave a few stops later she leaves behind the half-empty orange juice bottle standing on the floor by where she had been sitting.

3) A (very dark-skinned) (middle-aged) (black) guy with dreads, just slumped down in his seat for the entire ride.

4) A (very tall) (very husky) (white) guy with a plaid shirt and a knit-stocking cap on, and this huge huge brown and gray beard, and these big crazy eyes that don't blink as he every once in a while turns his head around to look back and see what's behind him on the car.