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.