Beatnik teaching recaps.

Like last month or so ago I caught up on the phone with my one (beatnik) friend who's from the Rust Belt and who teaches the Humanities in a public university in the Southwest.

He said that the kids in his classes this past year were great, and for class this year he assigned Obama's Jeremiah Wright speech, and then Amanda Gorman's inaugural poem, as well as some graphic novel dealing with (Chinese-American) identity.

"It's all stuff that they're going through and thinking about, so it's great," he was like.

He also said that he had some earlier readings assigned that had some prominent homoerotic themes, and though they were uncomfortable with that at first, they ended up being cool with that, and then later when they got to non-sexual readings they were all like, "Hey prof, where's the gay?".

He also recommended to me some Medieval French poem in a prose translation, for how good the stories are, for my personal reading.

Generational gap: Jello jigglers.

One thing that I realized in the aftermath of my making Pama jello shots and whatnot for my mini-celebration with my one assisted living client and her (lesbian) sister is that "jello jigglers" isn't some thing that everyone knows.

My client confessed to me that she didn't know what it was when I had first mentioned it, and she said her sister had earlier said the same thing to her, like, "What the heck is that?", after I had mentioned to her that I'd be making some as a cooking experiment.

So, I'm guessing that though I thought that jello jigglers have always been a thing, that maybe they were actually the product of a marketing campaign of my youth, and so my client and her (lesbian) sister missed out on that due to a generation gap and so that's why they didn't know anything about them?

That said, my client really liked the Pama jello jigglers, and just like me she thinks they're better than the jello shots.

Blogpost list detritus...

 ...that is illegible and uninterpretable (sp.?) and now will never result in a post:

7 violins + July fwns

 ~ udy (1-2 years Head)

 . . .

Several of those words, I honestly can't tell what the f*ck they are.

Interesting (Romanian) expression:

Nu te tragi de sirituri.

"Don't pull the shoelaces" (or "Don't pull from the shoelaces"?).

. . .

It means not to push levels of formality and force use of a more informal pronoun form when you're talking with someone.

I need to talk to my one (Romanian) coworker at the resthome and my one (Romanian) colleague from my doctoral program, but my sense is that because someone's standing up and you're pulling their shoelaces, image-wise, the effort to draw them closer is doomed to fail.

Weird tax problem this year:

The tax instructions and the voucher that you print out had a different address for where you mail the check, if you owe money.

. . .

I could have contacted someone, but I figured that they'd be figuring out everything on their end, so many letters would be coming into the one address and the other, and so I just went ahead and mailed it in to the address in the instructions.

An unexpected surprise at the resthome...

...the other week when I had to go check on a resident and then my one (edgy) (Ethiopian) coworker asked me to text the nurse for her using her smartphone:

I go to type punctuation, and though it works at first, I accidentally hit some wrong button to the lower left of the keyboard, and suddenly all the keys are in Amharic script.

Overheard resthome conversation: Other people's troubles.

The other week at the resthome, I was lingering in the lobby and waiting to clock out at shift change time, and my one (older) (white) (gay) coworker who works the frontdesk overlapped for like five or ten minutes with the (older) (gruff-voiced) (white) (townie) woman who also works the frontdesk, who had gotten to work a bit early that night.

And, she was talking about how her daughter's trying to get pregnant and so won't take the vaccine, but she's also going out drinking in the suburbs with her friends on the weekend, which doesn't make sense to her.

"Do one or do the other," she was like, "Either try or don't try, but don't say you're doing this when you're doing that."

She then asked my one (older) (white) (gay) coworker if he had ever heard of someone having to carry a dead baby to term, since that happened to someone she knows, the baby was dead because the placenta separated, and now the mom has to carry it for another month until she gives birth and then they can get rid of it.

"Yes, I have," my one (older) (white) (gay) coworker was like, "I think it happens a lot."

"But you hope they could get it out!", my other coworker was like. "She was talking, she says she's taking a bath, she can feel it kick, what do the doctors know, I mean, this lady's going mental, it's not a good thing."

My one (older) (white) (gay) coworker then said that he and his husband just had a friend and his husband over for dinner the other night, he's in his seventies and he's been married five years and he's finally happy, but his back was hurting, and when he finally went to a different doctor, it turns out that it's been prostate cancer, and it's Stage 4 and is actually working its way up the spine and splitting it open.

"I hate that when that happens!", my one other coworker was like, "Anything with your back, they tell you to take an aspirin, then it turns out it's something like that."