Resthome levity: Room name.

Last month at the resthome, I was assisting the one resident who moves slowly to a doctor's appointment in this one little medical room at the back of the building, and then while we were waiting outside the door to go in, the one (Japanese) resident who lives at the resthome and my one (Tibetan) coworker with an inappropriate sense of humor came outside to wait, too.

"Outpatient therapy room," the one (Japanese) resident read off of a sign by the door, and you could tell that she was confused by that phrase.

"I think the room is for physical therapy," I was like, "Not therapists."

 And, when I said that, you could tell that she was like, "Ahhhh..."

Then, I was like, "If it really was therapy, we would go, because we need it," and every time that I said the word "we," I pointed back and forth between myself and my one (Tibetan) coworker with an inappropriate sense of humor.

"It wouldn't work," the one (Japanese) resident was like, drily.

Addendum addendum.

Also also, back when I taught freshman writing, this one graduating senior later told me that the single most useful thing he learned in college was this one technique that I had from my writing training that I didn't even like, but which I had still taught at a seminar and that he had ended up using on pretty much every single paper that he wrote in college, he told me.

From that point on, whenever I taught it, I would tell the kids that I didn't find that technique all that useful, but it was an option to try, and maybe that it'd work for them, like it did for this one student.

Addendum.

Back when I taught at the art school, there was this one student who took my class on weird sex the very first time that I taught it, and who I ended up keeping in touch with after I bumped into her around the city a year or two after her graduation.

She told me several times that my class "meant a lot" to her.

In fact, I remember when I had the swingers into speak, the one lady swinger I know made an offhand reference to VP, and I had this confused look on my face, and that very student noticed and so she looked at me and got my attention and mouthed, "Vaginal penetration," and I was like, "Ohhhhhhh...." 

Also, I remember we were discussing the sex life of this really f*cked up culty author that people take culturally seriously, and she made this very profound observation about that author that "her voyeurism is part of her masochism," and it was very insightful and very profound and totally true, but it also suddenly struck me as how ridiculously intent we all were on discussing it, and how it was like this big coffee klatsch about a really f*cked up friend and what could possibly be going on in her head, and I started laughing so hard that I couldn't speak for like a minute and class totally ground to a halt while all the students just looked at me.

File-cleaning surprise.

One of my big projects since summer has been to slim down my files, chucking some stuff that I don't need anymore, rearranging some old stuff in ways that make more sense, and adding in some new stuff, and I finally got it done after working on-and-off on it for like two-and-a-half months.

One surprise that I came across was a sheet of notes that I took on 3 art objects on display at the city's major art museum, that I wrote up and led a tour on for some high school art teachers, back when I adjuncted at the art school and I signed up to do that, as part of a thing where I shared thoughts on integrating art objects into teaching on my area of academic specialty.

I can't remember exactly what the objects were, but it seems that I made a lot of points about creating space for bringing self-criticism into personal awareness and bringing social structures that need changing to the fore, and somehow I remember throwing in humor, too; in particular, I remember at lunchtime, this one art teacher was like, "I'm sitting next to you," as they brought their lunch over to join me.

That really was something that I'd entirely forgotten, and it was a very nice affirmation of that period of my life when I taught and it seemed like I potentially had a path there, at least at that time.

Powerpoint presentations.

So, I've been putting together a Powerpoint presentation, maybe only the second one that I've done in my life, and it is crazy time-consuming.

It's taken me like 10-12 hours to put together a tight 15-minute presentation that's now clocking in at 18 minutes.

That's an insane amount of work, for something gone in like 15 minutes. But, it's what you have to do.

Memory of a former (Albanian) nurse.

At the resthome, the one new driver for the resthome shuttle bus turned out to be (Albanian), and I was talking to him and it turns out that he used to be a nurse back in (Albania), only he couldn't transfer the training and he didn't feel like going through the training again here, so now he's just a driver.

He said he used to be an emergency room nurse, and he said that it always used to happen that you'd sit around for seven hours with nothing to do, and then right before you were ready to leave, a ton of people would come in.

"Once, it was thirty people, poisoning with food," he was like. "They came with a bus, thirty people, only two or three had the poison, and the rest hysterical, but you have to see them all."

Political dreams.

So, a lot of people have been talking lately about the one Massachusetts mayoral candidate with the last name "Verga" (mild Mexican slang for 'dick,' though I think that the guy himself is Italian heritage, since there's an Italian author with that name whose one story is behind the opera Cavalleria Rusticana).

Anyhow, lately I've been thinking, that if there was a candidate with that name in my area, I'd totally go and campaign for him in (Latino) areas, and I'd go all around and try to keep a straight face and be all serious with voters and be like, "Nuestra ciudad necesita Verga" ('our city needs Verga').