When I was out with my one (politics-careered) friend from college, his kids, and his girlfriend, I found out that his girlfriend used to be a political staffer, before she got sick of it and used the pandemic to make a long-overdue life move.
Interestingly, she's been increasingly sick of the growing number of influential nutjobs on both the left and the right, and she thinks that it's a huge problem that each party needs to clean up, though she doesn't know how they'll go about it.
When I also summed up my campaign of several years ago, including that I used my candidacy to get a political scandal in the press and that it eventually bore fruit and severely weakened the powerful incumbent, and that it cleared ground for redistricting to where it looks like he's not taken seriously and there might now be the creation of a long-overdue reboundaried district consolidating around a long-underrepresented ethnic minority, she was automatically like, "That's more than most elected officials can say they did in office."
Which, I think she meant honestly, and which I think is also true.
Just some credit more widely would be nice, for my accomplishments!
The week before I moved, I ended up meeting a (politics-careered) friend from college, his elementary school-aged kids, and his girlfriend to catch up over a bit of food, before he took his kids to a professional wrestling event at an arena near me.
I arrived a bit early to the area so I could be ready to meet them whenever they arrived, and I ended up grabbing a beer at a (relatively empty) (black-owned?) (black-clienteled) pizza restaurant/bar a few blocks away from the arena.
There, while I was sitting at the end of the bar having my (overpriced) beer and studying this new-to-me form of script from the ancient language that I've been studying the past several years, I overheard a (younger) (black) guy way down the bar say something to the (vivacious) (skinny) (young) (black) (female) waitress about tennis, like she played tennis.
"So you play tennis?", I was like, when she was walking near me, and she was like, "Yeah."
"That's intimidating," I was like, "I could never do that."
And, I explained that there was so much going on in tennis, from the serve to running around the court to having your racket at the right angle when you hit the ball, that it seems like "there's a ton of ways to mess up, and it's all on you."
"You're not wrong," she was like.
She also said that she plays at a court from a chain founded by this black celebrity and that she saw them at that location's opening, and she highly recommended that I go see the movie "King Richard," about Venus and Serena's dad and their early lives.
Since the resthome got us a Thanksgiving turkey again this year, but there was no way for me to cook it up since I was moving, and since on top of that I was also working Thanksgiving this year, I ended up having to take it with me when I was moving.
I googled a lot and it seemed like it would be fine so long as it thawed as little as possible, so what I did was turn my freezer down to the lowest temperature, wrap it in like 4 t-shirts and put all that in a canvas bag, and then I put the whole thing in the freezer and kept it there for like days. And, it was the last thing out of my house, and the first thing to move in when I arrived.
Unfortunately, the fridge at my new place had been unplugged, so I had to plug it in and let the freezer cool down again before I could put the turkey in, but the trip was only like 3 hours and the day was cool and even on the verge of cold, so I just set the turkey outside on the concrete slab outside my new little cottage, and it sat there in the evening for like another forty-five minutes, and then finally when the freezer was cold enough, I unwrapped the turkey and fired it in.
And, when I unwrapped it, the turkey was still so frozen that it was hard as a rock to the touch, all over its surface.
I think that was a success!
It turns out that the (shorter) (rounder) (late middle-aged) (white) woman who sold me my yearly bus pass is a cost-of-living refugee from Austin, Texas.
She's a Texas native and had lived in Austin for just years, but she finally moved three years ago, when rents were getting to be too much. She said that the small 2BR she had was just okay, but they were actually going to raise the rent up to $1500, and that was too much, and her best friend lives in the college town we're in because of their spouse's job, and they invited her up to come check it out, and so she did, and she moved.
I told this by text to one of the profs who ended up serving on my dissertation committee, who lives in Austin, and she said that the rent problem is actually even worse now.
I also just came across an article that the city I had lived in has been experiencing net population loss, but the county I moved to has been experiencing net population growth.
I totally get that. If you're not set up with money and it's increasingly hard to make ends meet in a city, why wouldn't you move to someplace like I am now?
It's really astonishing to me what major economic changes have taken place across the past ten to twelve years or so; just great swathes of existence simply aren't comparable, from professional sectors to livable places.
...from the one resthome resident who's a retired school nurse:
[my first name] -
Thank you for the gift of time to me.
The future is yours. Good luck.
[her first name]
. . .
(She also slipped in like fifty bucks, probably as a thank-you for this extra walking escort thing that I would always try to do with her whenever I was on shift, even when she wasn't assigned to me, which was most of the time lately, like at least for the past half year.)
