...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.
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]."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
